


your laugh is a thunderclap

by mintpearlvoice



Category: Avengers (Comics), Black Widow (Comics), Captain America (Comics), Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Aftermath of Violence, Avengers Family, Bucky Barnes Feels, Canon-Typical Violence, Disordered Eating, Dissociation, F/M, Family Bonding, Family Fluff, Gen, Genetic Engineering, Hurt Natasha Romanov, Hurt/Comfort, Hydra (Marvel), Hydra Is Terrible, Kid Fic, M/M, Medical Trauma, Multi, Neurodiversity, Panic Attacks, Past Brainwashing, Past Child Abuse, Past Sexual Assault, Protective Bucky Barnes, The Family That Kills Nazis Together Stays Together, Trauma, cap is here to kill nazis and smooch his partner and he's all out of nazis, everybody hates hydra, hydra tw, just a lot of past trauma in general, murdering fascists as coping mechanism, subtext sexual harassment
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-06
Updated: 2019-05-13
Packaged: 2020-01-05 13:19:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 17
Words: 34,180
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18366821
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mintpearlvoice/pseuds/mintpearlvoice
Summary: Hydra has a weapon no one knew about. They call her Snakebite, but she calls herself Rikki Barnes. She's a sniper, assassin, and spy. And she's thirteen and a half years old.After his deprogramming by Shuri, Bucky's been able to adjust to civilian life. Helping this near-feral girl whose traumas mirror his own, though? That's a whole new challenge.Currently, Rikki has stopped trying to kill her parents and decided she loves them three thousand, while Natasha angsts about the child she never expected to have.





	1. my useful fingers, a way to endure

**Author's Note:**

> So:  
> This fic operates under the assumption that Bucky, as well as his clone, were horribly abused by Hydra. It’s part of the characters’ backstories and will be obliquely referred to; however, there is no on-page abuse or sexual assault.
> 
> title & all chapter titles are from the works of Jeanann Verlee.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Nazis are, obviously, extremely evil and should be no-platformed and punched; the author apologizes for the tragic af lack of Nazi-punching in this chapter, but will try to fit some Nazis in as cannon fodder as soon as the plot and characters allow. 
> 
> This author, obviously, does NOT think that ANYONE should EVER have sex with a Nazi. Or an underage person. No such encounters will take place on page. (I just wanted to make that as clear as possible! It's very important to me that no one misrepresents my stance on this issue! Thank you for reading this author's note!!!)
> 
> Also: I've tried to warn for anything possibly triggering that could be contained in this fic, and will continue to do so as chapters update, but PLEASE let me know if there is anything- absolutely anything at all- that I may have missed, and I will gladly add it to the list of tags ASAP. 
> 
> If you feel that something already tagged in this story may be triggering to you, I encourage you to practice self-care and read something that you will enjoy instead. Your mental health is important and your coping mechanisms, whatever they may be, are Valid As Heck.

The base was dark. The generators were off; all non-essential personnel had long been evacuated Elsewhere. Rikki wasn’t essential personnel, even though she probably had more kills than anyone on base. Being a person was a prerequisite for that.

“Snakebite, asset ready to comply?” The man speaking had been her handler for the past several months. He’d been one of the better ones; willing to look the other way when someone else hurt her, unwilling to hurt her himself unless she really deserved it through some huge mistake.

“Yes, sir.” They’d let her out of the cage, and the time-release locks on her weapons would allow her to equip herself after everyone involved with Hydra had gotten away safely.

“Review your mission parameters for me.”

This was an order she could absolutely obey. Her favorite kind. “I’m to wait here until Captain America and assorted associates come to this base, acting on intel that Hydra higher-ups have allowed them to find.  When they walk under the beams in the main building, I drop down and strangle him.”

“And then?”

And then… Rikki pressed her fists into her stomach, forcing pain to drown out hunger’s emptiness. “Then I’ll be allowed to eat. I go to an extraction point and wait for pickup. I can consume rations at the extraction point, as well as whatever’s necessary to get me there, until someone comes to find me.”

“Good soldier. Remember, show no mercy.”

“Hail Hydra,” Rikki said, saluting crisply. She’d be brave, she’d carry out her mission perfectly; this would be the most important thing she’d accomplished in her thirteen and a half years of life.

Hours ticked by. The base was completely dark; only her night-vision goggles allowed her to navigate, only her instinctive sense of time allowed her to tell how long she had been left there for. I am a valuable asset, Rikki told herself, chewing on her lower lip. Hydra has invested significant funds and manpower into my training. Even with the failure of Project Insight and the confiscation of the Winter Soldier- no, especially with these incidents- my use is worth preserving. I have use.

Did she, though?

It was early spring, barely March, and Rikki’s thin civilian clothes- reinforced faux-leather jacket, Keds with holes in the toes, thrift store jeans and T-shirt- weren’t enough to keep her warm, even with her enhanced metabolism. The old wooden beams were large enough to curl up on, and she could stick her hands in her armpits to keep her fingers from going numb. She needed to be able to use her hands.

A creak down below. A shaft of light appearing in the dark, dusty space.

“You sure we’ve got the right coordinates, Cap? Looks pretty deserted…”

A flashlight flickering upwards, then around; barely missing her, settling on an open file cabinet. Old missions, Rikki knew, nothing that would compromise current ops.

“This is Hydra. I can tell.” 

That was the voice she recognized from mission briefing videos. Captain America. Her target. Kill him, save the people who’d created her, and she could probably ask for any reward she wanted.

One of the other Avengers operatives- Iron Man, the one who’d spoken first- lit up a panel on his suit, creating a circle of cold light. She got a good look at her target then. Ninety years old, apparently, but she had a hard time believing he was that much older than her. Messy hair, a gaudy uniform, just a little stubble. Although he carried a shield (vibranium alloy,) he wore no other armor. Not even around his head and neck. Soft target. Easy kill. Maybe she would even be allowed to eat dinner tonight.

Slowly, Rikki pushed herself back on her heels, preparing to spring down, calculating her angle and trajectory. Come on, she thought. Time- and her breathing- seemed to slow down. Come on, I’m ready for you to die.

He took one careful step forward, glancing to the side-

Rikki’s dive was swift and silent. He broke her fall, and she locked her legs around his torso, her skinny arms around his neck. 

“Oh shit, oh fuck, what is that- is Hydra using monkeys again, motherfucker-“ A high-pitched noise, the Iron Man suit’s weapons powering up.

“Stay back - don’t,” the Captain managed to choke out. “Blast radius- burn the place down…” He staggered back, slammed her against the wall, but she held fast.

“Die, enemy of Hydra!” she yelled, tightening her grip. She hadn’t been told not to talk, after all.

“Cap, is that a-“

 

 

A kid? Steve didn’t know. Wouldn’t put it past those assholes, either. After all, Bucky’s head trauma had made him a fantastic blank slate; wouldn’t a homegrown supersoldier be even better? Nat had mentioned the Red Room, talked about how young the girls there had learned what death meant up close: voice flat, green eyes distant, dead.

The thing was? It worked. Because right now there were two small hands wrapped around his neck, bony knees digging into his ribcage, and hurting the person who was trying to kill him was the last thing he wanted to do.

He had a lot more air in him than she probably thought, though. Years of almost dying from asthma as a skinny invalid in Brooklyn meant that he never panicked from not being able to breathe. Even now, his mind was clear. If he could surprise his probably less-experienced opponent…

Steve forced himself to go limp, dropping fast and sudden like a sack of flour. She twisted to brace herself, arms moving from around his neck; the second he landed, he threw her off, rolling away. “Tony, now!”

A modification he’d made to the suit on Spider-Man’s suggestion: a blaster that shot a concentrated burst of knockout gas. The cloud surrounded her, and she went still.

Steve breathed out, chest heaving. Hopefully she’d stay out until they got back to HQ… hopefully they’d be able to figure out what Hydra had done to this kid. How to save her. “Do it,” she snarled. “I failed, all right? Just kill me. I’m not high-clearance enough for them to have told me anything useful, I don’t know where other bases are, I don’t know their plans… it’s not worth torturing me, I’m not worth your time…” She dragged in another breath of the gas before toppling over.

Instead, the girl struggled to her hands and knees, trying to push herself up to her feet.

After a few syringes of drugs, she stayed sedated for the ride back to Stark Tower. Since Loki’s first attack, the Avengers had thought it prudent to build more containment spaces, just in case they needed to store an equally powerful or dangerous person. The one they’d chosen was similar to a regular interrogation room with a one-way mirror, but enhanced by both alien and Asgardian tech.

She’d come to during the debrief; Steve could get a better look at the girl they’d found in the abandoned Hydra base, the girl who had tried to murder him. She had messy carroty red-orange hair, cropped to just above her chin. Clearly she was a natural redhead- her face was very pale under her freckles. She couldn’t have been more than five feet tall, and her frame was tiny from starvation.  
And she was rocking back and forth, whispering something to herself.  
“Let’s enhance the audio feed on our murderkid here,” Stark said, poking at some console buttons without taking his eyes off the screen.  
Her whispering filled the room:  
“Rikki Barnes. Asset 11, special forces, June 4th 2005, Hail Hydra!”  
“Name, rank, and date of birth,” Steve said, realizing out loud. “That little girl thinks she’s a prisoner of war.”

 

Bucky preferred to come on missions where he’d be useful. Stealth assassinations with Tasha or Hawkeye, undercover work with Wanda. Old Hydra bases where he knew more about the layout than his team did. An old barn in the middle of nowhere, which Hydra had been using to store decommed tech and paper data backups? There was no point in him going. That didn’t seem like the kind of mission that needed a sniper.

And the fact he could actually pick which missions to go out on, admit he’d needed a rest after helping Spiderman break up yet another downtown ninja battle, getting poisoned with something that had him puking his guts out on the train, and then hallucinating from the antitoxin while Tasha solemnly got wasted next to his bed…

Damn good to just kiss Stevie goodbye like some kind of housewife, know that as long as he worked out and ate three meals and a snack and checked off two items on his self-care chart he could waste as much time as he wanted just lounging around like people did. Right now he was working his way through Star Trek (fucking hilarious, Picard was a handler he’d be proud to have, actually) and Harry Potter. (Too simplistic, he probably would’ve liked it much more as a child, but it felt good to have enough pop-culture knowledge to know that Steve was absolutely a goddamn Gryffindor. Also, the memes Spiderman kept trying to show him made way more sense in retrospect.)

He was sitting down to paint his nails (sure, he wasn’t an artist like Steve, but a clean coat of color was real satisfying in its own way) when his phone rang. He picked it up at once. “Stevie? Everything okay on the mission?”

“Yeah, but…” He cleared his throat. A deep sigh. “Hydra has a weapon we didn’t know about.”

“Fuck. Another one of the Hydra Winter Soldiers? Or is this one Soviet and reprogrammed- what’s the deal?” Although, considering Iron Man was on the case, it was possible that all Shield had to investigate was a vaguely charred corpse.

He took a while to answer, slowly. “She sounds American.”    
“And? I can tell you’re not telling me something.”

“She… the enhanced Hydra operative…” His voice broke in a way Bucky vaguely remembered; digging through the rubble of a bombed-out school, the devastated look on Cap’s then-young face when he’d realized no civilian present had survived. “Oh god, Bucky. It’s just a kid.”

The first thing he did when the away team returned from missions; hurry to his partner’s side and gather him into his arms. “Hey. I’m here- I’ve got you.” His memories of his own family were so fuzzy; all he’d learned about taking care of another person, he’d learned from Steve and Sam. He’d learned from the best.

Tension fell away from Steve’s broad shoulders as he drooped against Bucky. “She was so young. I could’ve fit both of her wrists in my hand, could’ve brought her back to NYC in a backpack. And those huge eyes… she thought Tony and I were going to kill her. Hydra sent out a twelve-year-old kid to assassinate me because they knew.” He rubbed his eyes. “Aw, hell.”

“Trust me,” Bucky said with a grim smile, “I get it- I’m the last person you need to tell how fucked up Hydra is. But you know what else I know? If anyone can help this kid, it’s us.”

“There’s something else I haven’t told you yet. Her name… she says her name is Rikki Barnes.”

Thoughts whirled in his muddled mind. He didn’t remember impregnating a woman, let alone recently. But that meant nothing; they could always have just hooked him up to some machine, collected his sperm, and-

And then what? Obviously, another person, the egg part of the equation, had to be involved.

Maybe there was someone else out there who’d borne his child, who was just as fucked up as he was… or someone lying dead somewhere because they’d tried to protect their child, or escape.  Perhaps he was getting ahead of himself, though. The important question was: had he fathered this child?

Although he’d gotten clearance to speak with her, he’d waited for a while. Just watching her through the one-way mirror, wondering if she was telling the truth.

Could it be a trick, a tactic to throw him off his game? Another one of Hydra’s schemes? Maybe. But.

The girl looked, Bucky thought, exactly like his sister Rebecca had at her age. Redder hair, sure. Her deep fawn-brown eyes, gangly limbs, pointy chin, and bold little nose, though? He remembered enough to know that those were all Barnes features.

A knock on the door.    
“Hey there,” he said cautiously, waving with his regular arm. “I’ve brought you something to eat. Do you know who I am?”  
Rikki leapt to her feet at once, the scowl on her face transformed to a smile as she accepted the greasy McDonalds paper bag. “Yes, sir. You’re the Winter Soldier, sir- you’re my superior officer, sir.”  
“I see,” Bucky said, although he didn’t. “And could you fill me in on that mission briefing?”

Rikki opened the bag and took a deep lungful of the French fry smell. Pleasure made her small face glow, momentarily transformed. She was serious once more when she looked up and asked, “Permission to eat, sir?”

Permission to eat. Fucking hell. That had been one of the nastiest bits of his conditioning, something he was deeply grateful that Shuri’s genius had been able to remove. Unless he was on a mission in the field, or undercover, he had to get clearance for each meal; just one more piece of pointless sadism, designed to constantly underscore how deeply Hydra’s claws were sunk into his brainmeat.

(He’d passed out from hunger before realizing that Steve didn’t know, that his best friend wasn’t punishing him just for the sake of it.) The idea of Rikki gagging on an innocuous mouthful, eyes wide with panic the same way his had been, infuriated him.

“Permission granted,” he said at once, keeping his voice steady. “Permission applicable for the next twenty-four hours.” Strange how everything that had struck him as just something inexplicable to be endured infuriated him when he imagined it happening to this scrawny little kid. (Steve before the serum. That was who she reminded him of as well, a little. Three hundred pounds of fight and fury in a ninety-pound package.)  
Plopping down into her chair again: “I’m supposed to be your mission partner if something needs two people.” She kicked her legs as she chewed and swallowed, evidently trying to not talk with her mouth full; the second she could, she burst out with words again. “Cause you wouldn’t see me as expendable the way you would a regular sniper who wasn’t your handler, right? Cause I’m your genetic material. I’m mostly you, except I’m smaller and I don’t need the chair. I’m good, I promise. I do everything anyone tells me. An’ I’m small ‘n real light and plus I really truly don’t eat much. Please don’t send me back to wait for orders, I’ll be good, I promise!” Her voice had risen in volume until the last few words were almost a shout as she bounced in her chair- at once, cringing away from an expected blow, she shrunk and ducked her head. “I promise,” she repeated in a whisper. “I’ll be really truly good. Really I will.”  
He caught her gaze when she glanced shyly up and realized what had been bothering him. Those big brown eyes, full of desperate yearning and hope? They were exactly the same shade as his. His haunted eyes looming out from this little kid’s angular face.  
It had taken him a few months, even with Shuri’s unbrainwashing tech, to remember that Steve was his best friend and not his best handler. He obviously couldn’t expect Rikki to learn autonomy right away, especially since she didn’t even have prior memories to draw on. Bucky laid his hands on the table: see, no weapon, I’m not assessing you as a threat. He could tell she was watching his every tiny movement. “I’m reassigning you to active duty under my command, Asset Rikki,” he said, and felt her exhale, shoulders dropping from her ears. “How much do you know about recent events?”  
“A lot of people from Hydra are dead. You defected.”  
Was that his imagination, or was there a hint of betrayal in her voice? But he’d always been loyal to whoever pulled his strings, not to an ideology. Hopefully she was the same. “I was reassigned to a new handler,” he said, and she nodded solemnly, all anger forgotten. She sat up very straight. “Understood, sir, what’s our task?”  
“Active duty in the paramilitary group known as the Avengers. My handler is Steve Rogers; Captain America.” He pulled up a picture on his phone of Steve out of uniform to show Rikki.  
Rikki examined the image warily, chewing her lip. Her shoulders hunched a little. “Is there anything I need to know about his methods, sir?” She was too well-trained to sound unhappy, just quiet. Bucky knew what she was asking. It was the same question he’d always wondered when he got a new handler: how is he going to hurt me, and why?  
“Steve Rogers hasn’t used physical force on me or invited others to do so.”  
“Really? You mean it?” She was evidently trying to sound and look skeptical, but there was still breathless hope in her tone.  
He’s a good man, Bucky thought, and I’m so lucky to have them. But he knew Rikki wouldn’t understand good except as a synonym for obedient. “The Avengers prefer to be lenient,” he said instead. “It makes them feel better if they can treat us like people.”  
Rikki leaned forward, elbows on the table. “So, easy to manipulate?”  
“Possibly.”  
He’d thought like that himself, but it was surreal hearing those words out of a kid’s mouth, in Rikki’s excited voice. Instead of replying he gestured to her half-eaten chicken and fries.  
“Eat as much as you can without making yourself sick, then I’ll show you around.”  
Rikki nodded eagerly and stuffed her face.  As she was eating, Bucky got a text from Steve:  
How’s the kid?  
I don’t know if I can help her, Bucky wanted to say, or she’s too much like me. He didn’t want to think about what atrocities in their pasts they might have in common besides just programming and starvation. Why she’d been so awed at the knowledge Steve wasn’t going to hit her. Instead he tried to be positive, so he messaged back: She trusts me. I think that’s a start.

At first, Rikki had been abjectly fucking terrified. She’d failed in her mission and woken up in an interrogation room. The Avengers didn’t know that she’d been telling the truth, that she really didn’t know anything about Hydra except what she was told. (And that wasn’t much! She was just an Asset, after all.) They’d ask her for information she couldn’t give, then start torturing her. Only if (when?) she broke under the pain would they finally grant her the mercy of death.

Then he’d shown up. The Winter Soldier, her one and only superior officer. The man she’d been trained her whole life to serve. She’d volunteered to kill Captain America just for a place at his side- and even though she’d failed the mission, she’d won her right to be considered a valuable asset.

This is what I was born for, Rikki thought, following one step behind him and one to the side as they walked through the Avengers’ residential floors of Stark Tower. If anyone came at the Winter Soldier- if anyone tried to attack him from behind, I’d get them first. I’d kick them in the knees and snap their neck, unless he wanted to interrogate them. Then I’d just put them in a headlock.

“The doctors might want you to gain more weight before you use the gym, but here it is, just so you know what you have to look forward to.”

Doors slid open; Rikki’s jaw dropped. She couldn’t even tell how high the ceiling was. Windows showed a huge expanse of sky and the city below. No one could sneak up on her from somewhere like this, assuming the glass was bulletproof. There was a rock climbing wall with several routes, including bouldering and an overhang. A running track around the edge of the room, much more fun than the treadmill past trainers had chained her to. And lots of workout machines and weights; she didn’t even know what all of them were for. (She’d never been allowed to have free weights in case she used them to crush someone’s skull.)

“Wow!” Rikki bounced up and down on her toes, struggling to remain polite and not raise her voice. “This is an amazing reward. I’ll work really hard to earn it, I promise, I’ll be really good.”

She’d already gotten an absurd amount of rewards today. A whole bag of food that wasn’t nutritionally complete, and even still warm. Getting to meet her new superior officer, finally. And they were allowed to walk around the base without a handler or even a technician accompanying them!

“This isn’t a reward, Rikki,” he replied, a frown creasing his face.

She bit her lip, examining her sneakers. “Sorry. I… I shouldn’t’ve presumed.” Of course she probably wouldn’t be trusted to use the gym yet, and definitely not the fun things.

“No, I mean…” He ran a hand through his long hair. “This is part of your maintenance package. You’re allowed to access any of the equipment within training hours. For your training.”

“Any of the equipment,” Rikki repeated. There was a catch. There had to be a catch, right? Maybe the rock climbing wall would slice her palms to ribbons if she tried to grab a handhold, maybe the weights would magnetize her to the wall. It was important to teach her to stop being bad, because obedience wasn’t genetic. “But I should ask permission first, right?”

“Only between 8 PM and 8 AM. Handlers want us on a regulation sleep schedule. Otherwise, yeah, you can come here whenever you want.”

He was her superior officer. He had no reason to consider her expendable, no reason to lie to her; he’d even given her twenty-four-hour blanket permission to eat! That meant when he said something… he probably meant it.

“Wow,” Rikki said, beaming.

Instead of telling her that her face was too easy to read, he smiled coolly back. “You haven’t even seen the swimming pool yet. There’s a hot tub and a water slide.”

“Permission to ask a question, sir, but what’s a hot tub?”

A hot tub, it turned out, was the best thing ever. Even though they were on a schedule, he let her roll up her sleeve and stick her whole arm into the thermos-hot, rainforest-hot bubbling water; sunlight was dancing in its clarity. “We’re allowed to use this, too.” It wasn’t a question, just something she was trying to comprehend. Everyone knew that luxuries (candy, blankets and pillows, warmth) weren’t for assets. She couldn’t help but worry if he was trying to trick her.

“Sometimes I come here after a mission and just soak for hours till someone drags me out. It’s the opposite of cryo, you know?”

She’d only been put in cryo once. As an experiment, to see how she reacted to it. She’d shivered for days. “I get it, yeah,” she said, nodding intently.

He looked at her funny- did he think she’d been put in cryo as a punishment?- but didn’t say anything, except, “Come on, let’s finish the tour.”

What shocked her most was when he pushed open a door on the floor he shared with his handler and said, “Okay. This is going to be your room.”

There was a bed. There were pillows and blankets on the bed. Robin’s egg blue walls, pristine white blankets edged with eyelet lace. A white-stained wooden desk that could probably be used to lock the door in a pinch, and a matching chair that seemed to have a great deal of heft to it. And… was that a bathroom through what she’d thought was a closet door?

She couldn’t have heard him right. Rooms were for real people, not Assets. “You mean it’s a handler’s room, or the room of someone I’m looking after?”

“No, it’s your room.”

“But you sleep in Handler Rogers’ room.” She barely managed to make it sound like a question, not like she was disagreeing with him.

“Handler Rogers is… he’s my mission. It’s in my best interests to ensure his safety, and sharing a bed with him allows me to more effectively counteract any attacks that may happen during the night.” It sounded like he was improvising, but it made sense. Handlers who didn’t let anyone hit you were few and far between, after all. “Your training, on the other hand? The Avengers want you to be able to operate as a civilian. Blending into groups of kids your age, possibly starting a school curriculum. Learning how to take the subway by yourself.”

“Are you operating as a civilian, too?” she guessed, proud of herself.

He smiled at her, which she counted as an unearned reward. “Yes, basically. That’s why I’m allowed so much freedom, why I was reconditioned to be able to eat without asking permission. I have a whole closet full of clothes, I don’t have to participate in every field mission, and I’m allowed to watch TV or play video games basically whenever I want. My mission parameters include getting used to such things.”

“Wow,” Rikki said in a tiny voice. She couldn’t imagine being well-behaved enough to earn that many rewards, or what her old handler would have made her do in order to earn them. Then, suddenly skeptical, she narrowed her eyes. “What do you have to do between field missions, though?” She felt instinctively sure he’d tell her about any of the real bad stuff with non-primary functions.

“It’s tough, but not damaging.” His tone was reassuring, like he knew exactly what she was worried about. “The Avengers are very focused on making sure that I can have autonomy when I’m operating undercover in the field.”

Not damaging. Phew! Rikki nodded intently, biting her lip. That had been a big part of what she was worried about.

“So, Steve- Handler Rogers, that is- along with his teammate Falcon, is retraining me to use a self-management protocol. Basically, I’m learning how to predict what he’ll say is best for me in terms of maintenance, such as getting a regulation amount of hours of sleep, meeting my minimum daily calories, and self-administering mental enrichment. I have various categories of tasks that I can log as accomplished with a computer program. For instance, my tasks for today involved food preparation and progression on reading material. Then I talk with Handler Rogers or the Falcon, or an operative under their command, about if my task log is properly balanced.”

“What tasks would I have?” she asked, curious despite herself.

“Probably something similar. Stabilizing and raising your BMI a few points, debriefing whatever you remember about your time working with Hydra, gathering street-level intel on the surrounding neighborhoods, and assimilating civilian social norms through the consuming of popular culture. Think you can handle that?”

“Yeah,” Rikki said, and breathed out hard. Whatever the catch to this was, whatever the bad underbelly was that lurked, she probably wouldn’t have to see it until her injuries have healed, at least. She couldn’t resist the prickling temptation to ask one more time, though: “So you’re sure it’s okay, though?”

 “Having your own room and sleeping in a bed? It’s part of your self-management protocol and assimilation of civilian social norms, of course. It’s necessary for the mission, not a luxury at all.”

Rikki breathed out slowly, so glad that it would be okay. Then she remembered.

On one of her only solo missions, her target had been a diplomat’s child. She was supposed to go into a playground, set charges around a jungle gym, and then detonate them remotely. Instead she’d looked at all the littler kids laughing and chasing each other around, sitting in their parents’ laps, playing hide-and-seek, and thought: Even if Hydra says it’s necessary, this can’t be right. 

Luckily, her handlers and technicians had assumed that the fault was with the charges (which failed to blow when necessary,) and not with her obedience programming. She always did her best to do what was right, and she knew that what was right and following orders were always the exact same thing.

But if she was going undercover as a normal tween… that meant her targets might also be children. Even if it meant endangering her superior officer, Rikki would never go along with an order like that!

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bucky probably uses some high-tech Stark version of a self-care app such as Aloe Bud.   
> https://aloebud.com/
> 
> Rikki's codename is a reference to the vintage Captain America antagonist team Serpent Squad:  
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serpent_Squad
> 
> Rikki "Nomad" Barnes is an actual character (and antifa badass lbr) in comics canon; an alternate-universe version of one of Bucky's alternate-universe grandchildren who is teleported into the main Marvel reality and forms the superhero team Young Allies. It's complicated. (She also fought her brother when he became a dangerous political extremist, and she was ready to take on the Red Skull as well- not bad for a teenager with no superpowers!)  
> https://marvel.fandom.com/wiki/Rebecca_Barnes_(Onslaught_Reborn)_(Earth-616)


	2. dad my body is a crime scene

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In this chapter: medical trauma/past medical abuse/rikki's horrible childhood & subsequent struggle setting boundaries/fandom OC easter egg reference!

Something that surprised Rikki was that her superior officer expected her to call him Bucky.

“It’s part of the civilian identity I’m working on building; getting used to responding to a name instead of a call sign. Even on missions, sometimes.”

“Bucky,” she repeated, nodding. It was a solid, strong name, but a bit playful, too. She liked it. “And people will call me… that is, will people call me Rikki?” She didn’t want to sound too hopeful.

“Of course, unless you’d prefer otherwise.”

That was confusing- why would she prefer things?- but she still nodded. “Rikki is fine, thank you.” (Secretly, she liked it better than Snakebite.)

When they got off the elevator on the next floor, Steven Grant Rogers- Captain America- was standing right there. He was out of uniform in a plain grey T-shirt, the sort that came in packs, and khaki shorts with lots of pockets. Lavender bruises formed a ring around his neck. The outline of Rikki’s long, thin fingers.

Take your punishment like a soldier, Rikki told herself. Head up, shoulders back. She marched off the elevator and held out her hand for him to take; stiff, but not shaking. “Sir. I’m sorry I tried to kill you, I was acting on old orders and inaccurate information from a former handler, sir. I apologize for any inconvenience or hardship that my disobedience to your authority happened to cause!” Should she kneel? No, Winter- Bucky, she reminded herself, that was what she was supposed to call him- was still standing. It was probably okay for her to be standing as well.

“It’s all right,” he said quietly, crouching down in a single fluid movement that put his head below hers. Startling, to see a handler act like that before an asset. Like she was somebody- like she was real. “Are you hurt at all?”

Other than feeling cold all the time, the knee injury that had never really healed properly, and her throbbing head from how she’d fallen face-first onto the hard-packed dirt? Well, those weren’t important. She knew not to ask for medical attention unless she was visibly bleeding and required disinfectant and stitches. That was probably a test to see if she was going to waste her new handlers’ time. “No, sir,” she said promptly.

Bucky and Handler Rogers exchanged a look over her head, one she wasn’t sure what it meant.

“Well, we’re going to have you looked over by a doctor anyway. Her name is Christine Palmer, and she’s been involved with Avengers operations for several years- highly recommended, highly trusted. She just wants to make sure that we have a baseline for what’s going on with you. There’s an office off medbay that’s often used by visiting doctors, it’s right this way…”

Rikki didn’t hear what he was saying, barely remembered where she was. Everything in her body wanted to just run and run until she was in a different state. Run until no one could find her. She focused on putting one foot in front of the other, digging her nails into her palms. 

No, Rikki thought. No, no, please, I don’t want this. But she couldn’t embarrass her superior officer in front of his handler- or worse, give Mr. Rogers a reason to punish Winter for her acting out. She could protect him; she could be good.

 

The smell of disinfectant. A high table covered by a roll of white paper. Cabinets holding Skull-knows-what. Rikki smoothed her hands up and down her thighs, trying to remember to breathe. No matter where, every doctors’ office was exactly the same.

 “Rikki, we’re going to have Dr. Palmer weigh you and take blood samples. Can you put this on?”

“And I should take off my clothes under it,” Rikki said flatly, not looking at him. She wasn’t going to be scared in front of a brand-new handler. She had to be a good soldier and show that she could follow orders.

“Yep. That way, she’ll be able to check for organ damage, make sure you don’t have any cracked ribs, and draw blood to check your vitamin levels. I doubt a needle would be able to get through that jacket of yours.” Handler Rogers smiled like it was a joke; she just nodded, lips pressed tightly together.

“Yes, sir.” Rikki whispered. He looked like he was going to say something else, brow creasing slightly, but when she made an effort to smile and nodded in the direction of the door, he headed out.

Okay, Rikki, she told herself. You can do this. Just go away in your head… just pretend you’re somewhere else, someone else. It doesn’t matter if it hurts, you need to be strong. Wouldn’t do for these brand-new handlers to know how much of a baby you are sometimes about the littlest things!

Like the time when they’d had to stick needles into her face, one by one in the thin skin of her forehead and jaw, and she could practically feel the tips touching her skull, and she’d started shaking for no reason. The time when they’d wanted her to carry a camera internally across a border and she’d had to swallow it: the size of two baby carrots put together, or an adult man’s thumb, and she’d gagged and sobbed the first three attempts before finally getting her shit together. The times she’d been told that taking painkillers for an injury would impede relevant data collection. The time they’d stored her in a room with bars on the windows and took the laces out of her shoes, forcing her to shuffle around in socks until she was needed for a mission once more. The time they’d IV fed and hydrated her because it was easier than sourcing food during the mission, and no one had noticed that they’d fucked up with finding the vein and sourced the drip too fast, even as she clutched her arm and screamed. The days she’d spent on the floor of her cell, clutching her stomach and throwing up after every attempt to work out, a doctor scolding her for managing her emotions improperly before grudgingly admitting that she might possibly have a tiny bit of organ damage. The time she’d had to sit through a briefing session with a concussion. The other head injury that a doctor had called “having an attitude” and “psychosomatic.” The tests where they’d shot electricity through her muscles to test which ones were tight and improve her knowledge of humanity, and by the end she could name every muscle in her body, but she was shaking uncontrollably and gasping for air and could barely limp out of the examination room on her own two legs. The times they’d threatened to restrain her and wheel her where they wanted her to go. The time she’d been thrown into the general medbay and stashed all night next to a captured enemy of Hydra who was being refused painkillers for a shattered arm until he talked. The time a doctor had pressed on a broken rib because he didn’t believe it was really truly broken and she’d panicked and kicked him in the face. The other time when another enemy of Hydra who kept screaming was stashed right next door. The five times she’d had to sit through a briefing session during which she’d fainted, because playing sick was no excuse. The time she’d been given a medication that made her hallucinate a nonexistent handler giving conflicting orders. The time she’d been given a medication that made her hallucinate shadowy enemy agents following her, vanishing every time she turned to face them head-on. The time a handler had yanked her arm out of her socket for disobeying an order, only it had gone back in by the time a doctor had shown up, and she’d been accused of wasting their time; the time a trainer had forced her into a stretch that dislocated both her knees, and said the doctors had said it was for her own good; the time she’d been poisoned with a drug that had shot her heart rate up to 160 and accused of not keeping up with her cardio workouts; the time people had forgotten to give her permission to eat for several days, and by the time it was given once more, she was so weak she had to crawl to the med bay for IV glucose while people she outranked laughed at her for dragging herself around on her hands and knees.

The time when-

There were things she didn’t want to think about, even in the context of reminding herself she’d been through worse. She tasted phantom chocolate-covered strawberries and lurched forward, gagging as she tried not to puke. Even if Handler Rogers was a good handler, he’d be furious at her throwing up for no reason.

“Get it together,” she said out loud, bringing her fists down on her thighs hard enough to leave bruises. The pain steadied her. She tugged on her short messy hair and took a deep breath: all the way in, all the way out. Not my first rodeo, she reminded herself once more, and I’ve had worse.

Rikki took off her clothes, even though she didn’t want to, and folded them carefully. Hospital gowns were always too thin for air-conditioned rooms; she curled up into a tiny ball, trying to stay as warm as she could.

“Hi, Rikki. My name is Dr. Palmer. I’m here to check on you and possibly draw some blood.”

Bare feet on the floor, gaze over her shoulder, hold out your arm for the cuff: don’t wince when it tightens. Of course her pulse is a little high, she’s terrified.

She’s short for her age. She’s underweight. (I’d eat more if I could, Rikki wants to say. I’m not always allowed; my body won’t digest food unless someone says it’s okay.)

“Next, I’ll draw a few vials of blood to check your vitamin levels, okay?” She looked at Rikki like she was waiting for her permission. That was bullshit. Everyone knew that saying no to doctors wasn’t allowed. Rikki just extended her less-bruised right arm- luckily, she’d been trained to be ambidextrous- and nodded. From what she’d seen in the field, a lot of civilians apparently minded the sight of their own blood. Rikki just watched, unaffected, as hers filled the vial. She was too well-trained to wince at the slight tug when Dr. Palmer swapped the yellow Vacutainer with another one, or when it took her a few seconds to get an absorbent square pressed on Rikki’s arm after she’d removed the needle.

“Great job, Rikki. You have very good veins.”

“I was bred to have good veins,” didn’t seem like the sort of thing you were supposed to say to a civilian. She just nodded and answered mechanically: “Thank you, Dr. Palmer. That’s very kind of you to say.”

“Okay, so: if you could lift up your gown for me, I’m just going to make sure you don’t have any internal injuries.”

Rikki must have let some emotions slip as a microexpression, because Dr. Palmer frowned and said, “Obviously, we don’t have to do that! If you say you’re not in pain, I trust you. You seem like a responsible young person.”

Ah. That was the catch! Even though she was being treated like a civilian, she had to remember she wasn’t a real person. “Do it,” Rikki said emotionlessly, “it’s your job, after all, it’s not my place to go and get in your way.”

She pulled up her hospital gown, laying back and staring up at the celing. How many tiles were there on the celling? How many times could she hear her own heartbeat in her ears? She could think about songs she’d heard on the radio, twist her fingers so it looked like knots, visualize her last successful mission in detail start to finish. Anything but thinking about where she was and what could be happening to her body right now. Hold your breath and it wasn’t real. Refuse to feel it, and it would go away. 

“Rikki? Okay, I’m going to start touching you now, let me know if anything hurts.”

The second Dr. Palmer’s soft, cold fingers were on her bare skin, she flinched, reflexively curling away. Trying to burrow into the paper that covered the table, into the miniscule gap between the table and the wall. Stupid. She couldn’t even keep it together for that long! “I’m sorry,” she whispered, trying to force herself to sit up, to wipe her tears and act like a good soldier. Her body had a mind of its own, wanting to become smaller and smaller. “I’m sorry, I won’t make a fuss, I know your time is important, I shouldn’t be disagreeing, you know more than I do-“

Dr. Palmer said something she couldn’t make out. Footsteps moving away. Another set of footsteps coming back; heavier, slightly uneven. Her superior officer.

I don’t want to be here, Rikki thought, and, stupidly, I want to go home! I want to go home! It was something she’d heard a civilian child say once during an evacuation, and it had stuck with her. But assets didn’t have homes. They had handlers. Her mouth felt slimy; her heart pounded.

“Rikki?” It was her superior officer. “Look at me, Rikki.”

Except she couldn’t move. Her body felt frozen, drained of energy. A rhythmic noise: her shaking hands rebounding against the wall. She didn’t want to disobey him. But as long as she stayed curled up small, her eyes squeezed shut, she could ignore anything that happened to her.

He wouldn’t be the one to force her to lie flat, to slurp a chalky fake-chocolate barium milkshake or swallow pills that made her stomach throb and the room spin. He would just have to sit by and watch, and she didn’t blame him for that. It wasn’t as if he could protect her. For all his strength, the Winter Soldier was only an asset himself.

“Rikki,” he said again, soft, almost gentle. And then, in what she thought of as Handler Voice: “Asset Snakebite. Would physical contact improve or decrease your state of functioning at this present moment? Asset, report.”

 

The fact was that she’d been genetically engineered to help him. She was like a gun or his metal arm; if something happened to her, if she ceased to function, it would be a detriment to his capacities in the field, and she knew he knew that. He was the only person who would face consequences for hurting her. The only person whose touch she could expect to not cause pain.

“Improve functioning, sir,” she whispered, her face still turned to the wall, her body curled up tense.

Warmth on the back of her head; the fingers of his organic hand cupping her skull, stroking above her tangled curls. The steadying weight of his other hand on her back, soft cool pressure like a reminder that breathing was possible. “There you go, Rikki. Easy now. I’m here.”

Usually hugs and physical contact in general were a reward, if she’d been especially good. She’d done nothing to earn the calluses on his fingertips, the deliberate strength in each careful gesture as he rubbed her back.

“Just keep breathing. That’s good; you’re doing a fantastic job, kiddo.”

She wasn’t. But she wanted to believe him, because he sounded like he believed himself.

“You’ve had your tour, you sat through as much of your checkup as you realistically could. I’m thinking we go back to our floor, I’ll show you how the smart TV works, we make microwave popcorn. How does that sound?”

Those were all rewards! She hadn’t earned them, couldn’t believe he wasn’t throwing them in her face to mock her with her failure, even though he’d been so kind a moment ago; she always made handlers run out of kindness and patience. Could her superior officer really be any different?

“I’m fine here, thanks,” Rikki whispered, her voice slightly muffled.

She expected him to sound aggravated when he spoke next, or at least a little impatient; instead she heard fabric shifting and paper rustling. He was leaning on the table. He didn’t want to leave her alone. “Okay. Well, I’d rather head upstairs with you. Would it be okay if I carried you?”

Rikki had only been carried once, when she was almost too young to remember it- after the six-year-old assessment when she’d been chosen as the ideal gene meld, and the other clone variants had been quietly disposed of. She’d been insensible with meaningless fury and grief, unable to move, and Operative Murphy had said “oh for godssake” and picked her up. Even though she knew he didn’t care about her- she was just an asset, worse than even the most annoying civilian bad kid- she still rested her head on his shoulder.

She’d seen civilian kids in bomb aftermaths and evacuations; arms around an adult’s neck, or cradled unconscious. It seemed comfortable and safe. Like if anyone were shooting at you, they’d hit the adult first, and their body would shield you once they were dead. Rikki had always wondered what it would be like to feel that safe.

She didn’t look up, but she nodded.

Her superior officer- Bucky, she reminded herself, she was learning civilian protocol- scooped her up like she weighed nothing. One arm around her shoulders, another under her knees. Would they see Dr. Palmer again on the way out? Instinctively, she turned her face against him, seeking shelter.

“You can close your eyes. I’ve got you.”

Like: “we’ve completed the mission, we’re heading in for extraction.” Like: “one day you’ll be decommissioned, and I promise all this pain will stop.” Maybe they walked past someone on the way to the elevator, maybe more than one person. Rikki just curled up against the Winter Soldier, breathing him in. Knowing that anyone who wanted to hurt her, to give her the punishment she deserved, would have to get through all that strength.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> here are some quotes I came across while I was writing this that felt relevant: 
> 
> "In one early study, Dr. Pennebaker asked 46 healthy college students to write about either personally traumatic life events or trivial topics for 15 minutes on four consecutive days. For six months following the experiment, students who wrote about traumatic events visited the campus health center less often, and used a pain reliever less frequently, than those who wrote about inconsequential matters." — Celeste Robb-Nicholson, M.D; Editor in Chief, Harvard Women's Health Watch  
> https://www.health.harvard.edu/healthbeat/writing-about-emotions-may-ease-stress-and-trauma
> 
> " If you’ve experienced trauma, art — whether it’s drawing, painting or writing, can help you cope." - Terry Sullivan, The New York Times   
> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/07/well/how-i-used-art-to-get-through-trauma.html
> 
> A valuable resource for abled people wishing to learn more about medical trauma, an issue often faced by members of the disability/chronic illness community, is the hashtag #medtraumachat:  
> https://medicaltraumas.wordpress.com/medtraumachat/


	3. so i don't twitch, so i don't riot

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this chapter contains general "hydra being terrible guardians of a child" content, plus a panic attack!

Bucky wouldn’t know for sure if Rikki was his biological child until a few days later, but he already felt protective of her. So many tiny details about the way she acted dug up fond memories he couldn’t quite place, yet knew in his heart he’d encountered before. The way she tugged at her hair when she was thinking, ducked her head when she giggled. How she leaned forward intently when he put on a TV show about baby animals that they could watch together, chin in her hands and elbows on her knees.

“Here,” he said, handing her a blanket from the back of the couch.

She took the velvety material, but looked at him, puzzled. “What’s this for? I mean, what’s it a reward for?”

Because you’re a good kid and I’m glad to have you around, was what he wanted to say, but knew she wouldn’t understand. Instead: “For not flinching when Handler Steve was in the room a few minutes ago. That’s an essential part of civilian behavior.”

Within seconds she was a content cocoon in the soft blanket, rubbing the hem against her cheek.

 She was supposed to eat small meals- snacks, more like. He’d learned by trial and error; luckily, she had a meal plan. Whether she was just happy with whatever was put in front of her, or they shared tastebud genetics, they got excited over the same foods: lurid orange instant mac-and-cheese, plain microwave white rice with butter and salt, macadamia nuts by the handful. And frozen blueberries. Especially frozen blueberries. When he’d offered her the bag, she’d put one in her mouth- and then needed to sit down, eyes wide as she chewed silently, just to process the taste.

“I love it,” Rikki said, as if she had never loved anything quite as much, and “oh my GOD I’m gonna try and catch them in my mouth.”

A half-cup Tupperware. She caught every one.

Hydra tended to use chronic sleep deprivation as a form of punishment, so it was no surprise to him that, shortly after dinner, Rikki began squinching up her face in a try-not-to-yawn way.

He gave Steve a look: remember when your overtired dumb ass used to pull that same exact shit?

Steve stood up from the table, pushing his chair back. “Right, I’m making an executive decision; I know you’re probably used to staying up late, but I’d like to start you on an early bedtime, okay? You remember where your room is, right? Tony- that’s Mr. Stark, Iron Man- he’s had some sweats and tees delivered that should be about your size, and in a few days maybe we can all go out shopping for something that you’ll actually like.”

Bucky winced at Rikki’s split-second look of confusion. Asking her what she liked might be too much too soon.

Rikki kicked off her shoes. “I know where my room is. And I can get undressed by myself, and I promise I’ll sleep through the night and I won’t make a fuss or anything. You won’t have any reason to be angry at me tomorrow morning, and I’ll stop bothering you and go away right now.” She scurried out of the room, adding “Thank you for the dinner, I mean it, I’ll work harder for such rewards once I’m assigned tasks!”

Bucky wanted to go after her, but when he heard her door close, he thought that it would be good to give her the experience with privacy.  

 

 Rikki was dreaming about dying. About wondering if she would die.

“It’s sick. Apparently the asset got a lungful of chemical gas. No idea what that does.”  
“It’ll be fine, we don’t need to waste medical treatment... it has a healing factor.”  
  
Please, Rikki tried to say. But convulsing on the medbay floor, all she could do was gasp for air, limbs flopping helplessly. Fucking pathetic. Maybe she’d get to die- but she wanted to live, even this life. Please help me, she wanted to say, but knew none of the adults would listen.  
  
A broken-off cry. Bucky opened his eyes, instantly awake; the wheezy sob had come from Rikki’s room. He gave Steve a quick kiss on the forehead and grabbed his shirt from the nightstand, putting it on as he ran. Rikki had fallen asleep with her head under the blanket; now she was audibly gasping for air. He tugged the blanket from her curled-up body. Tears were running from under her closed eyelids; her small frame shook with noiseless sobs. Should he put a hand on her shoulder or arm to wake her up? Then she sat bolt upright, brown eyes huge as she gasped for air. “Sorry,” she said as soon as she could speak. “It’s the middle of the night, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean-“  
“It’s okay, baby girl,” Bucky said, trying to keep the exhaustion out of his voice. With practiced movements, he used the hair tie on his wrist to pull his long brown locks into a ponytail. “One apology is sufficient.”  
“Noted, will comply,” she whispered, swiping tears from her face. “I’ll go back to sleep. I made a mistake bothering you and I won’t do it again.” It would have sounded firmer if she hadn’t sniffled.  
“Only mistake I see here is that you fell asleep with your head under the blanket. Why’d you do that?”  
A little shrug, almost sulky. “Sorry. I was just cold... I can sleep on the floor if you want.”  
“Hey, no. That’s unnecessary. Remember; they want to treat us like people. That means doing people things. Not because we deserve them, but because it makes handlers and co-workers comfortable.”  
“Like sleeping in beds,” Rikki said, and then, a mischevious gleam in her eyes, “Like sleeping in beds and... maybe eating midnight snacks?”  
“You’re speaking my language, kiddo. What can I get you?”  
She answered at once: “McDonald’s.”  
“Not sure if they’re open at five in the morning- would potato chips do?”  
“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.” The change in her expression was subtle, but he could tell she meant it. while it wasn’t cold in the room, that just meant it was not cold by his standards. Rikki was much smaller- it made sense that she’d be freezing.  
“I’ll bump the heat up a bit- you get comfy.” He didn’t want to frighten her by offering a hug or asking her about her nightmare, but lingered in the doorway to watch her burrow into the quilt.  
By the time he came back with a bag of chips, she was already fast asleep. She would wake up instantly if he stroked her hair or put a hand on her back- he knew because he was the same way. But when he sat next to the bed, leaning against the mattress, she barely twitched. There was a song he remembered, a slow tune he’d heard through a window. Maybe hummed by an ally or on an old radio, maybe on an assassination mission- maybe something from back in the day that he couldn’t quite recall. Now he realized that, whatever the context, it had been seemingly destined for life as a lullaby. A stone can grow without rain, the lyrics meant, a heart can cry without tears.

Rikki still slept deeply; he watched her face smooth out, her little lethal fists unclench. 


	4. there are no monsters here, I don't see ghosts

Rikki was still asleep when he woke, Steve gone with a note on the fridge saying “gone to fight Doombots, love you, xoxo” and then a perfect little caricature of a Doombot getting its head bashed in with a well-thrown shield.

He decided to go through his morning routine before waking her. Yoga, a few laps around the roof garden, target practice (knives, today.) reading through his affirmations and self-care plan. Vegetable smoothie, because it was easier to just zone out and chug it than remember he had to actually include the non-tasty food groups, scrambled eggs, a few pieces of toast dripping with butter and jam. Standing in the shower with his head tipped back, basking in the warmth as it rinsed everything but yeah-this-is-nice out of his head. He’d done arm maintenance a couple days ago; ring finger was a millisecond slow on the extension, but didn’t need a tune-up yet. He could repair it in the dropship on the way to an away mission if he had to, anyway. (Usually what he did next was a sudoku or crossword puzzle, and then heading out to his volunteer gig if he and Natasha didn’t have anything scheduled together in terms of sparring or briefing, but Rikki had to be at least waking up by now.)

Maybe eventually he and Rikki would do morning sun salutations together. He could braid her wild hair so it didn’t get in her face during warrior pose, the same way he tucked his own into a bun. He could find a smoothie recipe where you couldn’t taste the kale. Maybe someday the two of them would be leaving notes for Steve: secret mission, love you, don’t wait up.

Oh shit, Bucky thought, maybe I could give her a grenade launcher that’s just like mine, only smaller. Maybe Shuri could make her a tiny vibranium grenade launcher that folds into a shield. The idea made him grin so hard his face hurt. Making another one of him was probably the dumbest shit Hydra had ever pulled, especially since Rikki’s aim was probably just as good as his.

It took Rikki a while to notice that someone was trying to shake her awake. Her eyes wanted to stay closed, but she forced them open anyway.  

“Hey, it’s almost noon, kiddo. I let you sleep through breakfast, but I don’t think I should have you missing lunch.”

It was her superior officer. He’d opened the windows, and she could barely squint at his face.   
“Too bright,” she muttered, glaring up at him, and yanked the quilt over her head. “I didn’t get my medicine, if you wanted me to stay awake you should’ve...” she trailed off, blinking. “Just a few little minutes,” she added, and pulled the covers all the way over her head.

Part of Rikki was like: I should be worried. I had the serum- I have special genetics. I don’t think I can even get sick, can I? So if I feel like this, something’s wrong… But the bed was so soft, the pillows at just the right height, and it was so easy to not think of anything at all.

Shit, Bucky thought. What if she was poisoned, and it was the sort where it’s the withdrawal, not the poison, that kills you- what if she was set to self-destruct-  
He had only just met her the other day. Already he knew he couldn’t lose her. He needed to get to the lab, ASAP.   


“If you haven’t finished analyzing those blood samples yet I will break a beaker and shove the pieces up your nose, I swear to god,” Bucky said by way of a casual good-morning greeting as he shoved through the doors.  
“Ah, Capsicle the second. How much did you know about Hydra’s experimental biotech division?” Tony had this way of turning everything into a joke. He could be pinned down under enemy fire, and his voice on comms would still be that same casual, good-humored drawl.

Bucky had read about the incident that turned a playboy scientist into a defender of humanity. He knew the jokes were probably a coping mechanism, or at least meant to conceal one. And yet, inexplicably, they still got on his nerves. Maybe because men who could joke their way through a firing squad had, in his experience, been on the safe end of the guns.   
“Nothing. Because I wasn’t considered human enough for them to speak to unless it was an order or a reprimand.”  
He cut Bucky off, spinning a sealed test tube between his fingers. “No problem, we’ve got some clean data from yesterday’s raid. Anyway, there’s a really interesting chemical in the blood sample-“

It wasn’t his choice of words that made Bucky’s control fray- it was the way his eyes lit up. As if his daughter possibly dying was just a scientific experiment. Another early Saturday morning in the lab. He charged forward, grabbing a surprised Tony by the front of his shirt and slamming him into the wall- more for show than for pain, making sure he hit with his back instead of his head, but it was still enough to make Tony’s eyes go wide.  
“Tell me how you would feel if it was your intern who couldn’t stay awake long enough to get out of bed, and you had to watch them fight to stay conscious long enough to ask for help? You’ve got enough of a heart under the arc reactor to be capable of absolute panic, I’m sure of it.”  
His expression twisted into a snarl, fear replaced by fury underlying deadly calm. “If you’re threatening Parker, I swear to god-“  
Something buzzing, like a finger on a wineglass, sparks in the air; they both turned to look. A golden portal made from interlocking geometric shapes irised open in the air, and Dr. Strange stepped casually out. Instead of full robes, he wore his cape over a ribbed knit navy sweater and dark jeans, an incongruous yet somehow reassuring look.

“Hello, both of you,” he said with a wave that also zipped the portal up. His calm, casual attitude made Bucky feel more uncomfortable about his own anger than threats could have; slowly, he released his hold on Stark’s shirt and edged back.

“Lovely morning we’re having,” Dr. Strange continued. “Stark, I finished replicating the chemical compound, as instructed. I trust both of you understand that everyone here has the child’s best interests at heart?”  
“Strange,” Bucky said, nodding. Magic made his skin crawl, but that wasn’t the sorcerer’s fault. “Hopefully you know what’s wrong with my daughter?”  
“Morning, I can answer that.” That was Banner, still in his button-down flannel pajamas and grey fleece slippers, emerging from a side room with a brightly colored mug in his hands. “You want some coffee, tea? I’ve been drinking, uh, a tulsi-chamomile-nettle blend. Needs about three teaspoons of raw honey to make it palatable, but it’s surprisingly calming, steadies the nerves.”  
“He doesn’t drink tea,” Tony said absently. Addressing the coffeemaker: “Three sugars, half milk, and while that’s brewing, let me tell you about Hydra’s biotech program.”

Coffemakers that took instructions? He’d never get over that. And, oddly enough, he found everyone’s casual attitude reassuring.   
If they had time to drink tea and coffee, if Strange had time to gel his hair, it couldn’t be that serious... right?  
“So: experimental drugs. Artificial neurotransmitters, replacing the need to sleep, much like I attempted to do with energy drinks in grad school,” Tony said, plopping down on a stool and shifting his weight to spin rapidly. When he was facing Bucky again: “Apparently they’ve been giving Rikki steadily larger doses for about two months, got her stabilized at two, maybe three hours of sleep per night. The withdrawal should have started hitting her last night- vivid extended REM sleep, night terrors, exhaustion, et cetera. It shouldn’t be dangerous, just difficult, basically.”  
Bucky nodded slowly. “Okay. So what would you suggest?”  
“I’d say it’s more of a case of what you think she would accept. Depending on how you think she’ll take to daily injections, or to the knowledge that Hydra was drugging her...” Banner trailed off.   
“So I let her detox, feed her whenever she’s awake enough,” Bucky finished.  
Dr. Strange nodded, removing a vial from a cloak pocket and holding it up to the light. “And let us know if anything changes,” he said distractedly.

The fancy, glossy black coffee machine made a noise, and Tony beamed. He kicked off the table to zoom across the room towards it, still seated.  
“Can I interest you in coffee?”  
  
The fact was, most of the Avengers- hell, most of the superheroes on the planet- were Steve’s friends. Steve could make friends with anyone; Bucky, on the other hand, was content with a few trusted people, one or two at a time. When they were younger, it had been the other way around, with people tolerating the scrawny, effeminate artist as long as he was under Bucky’s confident wing. He wondered if the man he used to be would have resented the way things had changed.  
“I’m good,” he said, and headed off to his own floor without looking back.  



	5. we've been hunted before

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rikki catches up on sleep. Steve and Bucky try to get some time to themselves.

It took Rikki a long time to realize that someone had shook her awake.  
“Hey there, sweetheart. You think you can sit up for long enough to drink a smoothie?”

Her internal sense of time, usually so precise, felt unclear.  
“How long’ve I been out? I probably... supposed to get things done...” Rikki jolted upright in panic as she noticed that light was streaming through the window. “My tasks! I missed them, I’m supposed to be learning things-“  
“I’ve revised your assignment. Hydra’s been drugging you; your current task is to get it out of your system, sleep it off, and try your best to keep from losing any more weight while you’re at it, yeah?”  
He’d said a lot of things; only one mattered. “So I’m not in trouble.”  
“Course not. I know you’re doing your best.”  
She was, and tension ebbed from her body in relief that he understood. I’m doing my best, I promise, she still wanted to say, but then she was being propped up on pillows, a straw held to her lips; in the soft illumination of a few dimmed lights, she could make out Bucky by the edge of the bed. “Come on, little soldier. A couple sips, and I’ll let you go back to sleep, okay?”  
Rich dark chocolate mingled with something she couldn’t understand: not quite peanut butter, not quite mint.

“What’s that?” she asked between sips. “’S yummy.”  
“Avocado and hazelnuts.”  
Rikki didn’t know what those were, but she still liked them. Once she’d slurped to the bottom of the glass, she realized there was something important she needed to know. “Why’m… why am I so sleepy?” Was this some sort of punishment?

“Hydra was giving you drugs to make you not need to sleep, basically. Your body is catching up. Would you prefer to take a few small doses while you get used to not having it anymore, which would be easier… or just go off it all at once?”

She didn’t want anything of Hydra to be inside her ever again. “No medicine. Just gonna take a nap. Gonna be the best at taking naps ever… take all the naps.”  
The next thing she knew she was lying down again, and her superior officer was pulling the quilt over her shoulders. I’m sorry, she wanted to say, or I’m sure you have something more important to do than look after me, but darkness swept over her and claimed her first.  
A dream of running through endless sterile corridors, while cheers and screams came from the ballroom that she knew was somewhere below, only she couldn’t find a way down.  
“Come on, look at me, it’s just a dream.” A warm, rough hand around hers; gold evening sunlight through the window.  
She managed a trip to the bathroom and back, and then half a veggie burger with cheese in a bun, before deciding to just rest her head for a moment- a moment that, somehow, turned into hours.

Hydra kept finding him again, in her dreams. Throwing him into iceberg water and holding him underwater until he stopped struggling and the blue depths bloomed red. The chair, and then once the electricity’s crackle had quieted he was just as angry at her as everyone else. She was wandering through a gold-and-cream pavilion where everyone wore masks that made them look like animals in suits and ballgowns, and he would die if she couldn’t free him from the pool of squids, but the air was so thick she could barely crawl, let alone stay afloat.

One time she woke up and there was no one there.

“MR. WINTER SOLDIER,” she screamed, and then “DAD,” until her voice went hoarse, and then nothing at all, just whimpers knifing through the air. If he was gone- if no one here would protect her- Hydra would find her again, so many cages with no doors-

A hand in her hair, just as she’d sobbed herself almost back to sleep.

“I’m here, Rikki- I’m so sorry, I was on another floor and I’m here now. I’m not going to leave you, I’ll even carry you to the kitchen so we can get something to eat together, okay?”

Rikki nodded, wrapping her arms around him. If he was within her reach, she could kill anyone who tried to touch him. It’s just a dream, she wanted to tell herself. It didn’t happen.

But if she couldn’t protect her superior officer from being recaptured by Hydra, was there anyone who could protect her?    
  
Luckily, Bucky could switch to reserve duty, cancel his volunteer gig, and give Jarvis a set of guidelines for getting food delivered; he could be awake when Rikki was, meet her sporadic periods of varied lucidity with calmness and food. And his sleep schedule was weird as a result, but not so weird that it prevented him from seeing Steve.  
“Hey, you.” Steve said as he sauntered in, throwing his coat over a chair.  
“Hey,” Bucky said, giving him a hug; it had only been a few days that he was gone, but every day without seeing Steve’s stupidly pretty face and unfairly bright smile felt annoyingly long. “How’s Doctor Doom?”  
“You know. Liminal relationship to international law, should really be the Fantastic Four’s problem, robots keep catching on fire when I throw my shield at them. The usual, and I don’t like it, but at least we’ve saved Central Park from turning into the next Latverian army outpost.”

“My hero,” he said fondly, ruffling Steve’s hair before kissing him on the side of the head, and then on the lips, long and luxuriously, before pulling away.  
“How’s the kid been since your last update?” Steve asked, sitting in a chair at the kitchen table. Regular furniture always seemed too small for him. He was larger than life, in more ways than one.

“Rikki won’t stay awake long enough to explain what she likes, so Jarvis’s ordered me delivery from pretty much every restaurant I’ve ever five-starred. We’ve got eggplant Parmesan, spinach lagnasa, tuna melt meal kit... one thing I know for sure is that we feel the exact same way about cheese. And blueberry corn muffins, but there are enough of those left that you can have one... well, half of one.  
You know me. One of everything.” Jarvis had set up a baby monitor protocol, patching the room’s ambient audio into a custom-built phone. He could tell if she was having a nightmare or an episode of sleep paralysis because the patterns of her breathing changed, hurry to her side before she worked herself up into hysterical sobs and gagging from stress.  
“Do you think there’s been any improvement, though?” Steve asked as they ate.  
Honestly? He wasn’t sure. Rikki had been weepy and incoherent, shivering in terror at phantoms only she could see, throwing herself off the bed in an effort to go with him when he left the room. He’d set up an air mattress outside her door because it was the only way for him to get more than a few hours of sleep. “I don’t know... maybe it was a mistake to let her go off the drug cold turkey, even if Strange said it would be fine. She’s exhausted, she can barely open her eyes, but she can’t sleep for more than a few hours without nightmares...”  
Steve reached across the table and laid a hand on his. “I know this is hard for you. Would it help if I was on reserve duty, too? Maybe we could switch off. Let you have some time out of the tower.”  
The idea was tempting, but he knew it wouldn’t work. “She’s going to think you’re a handler... I’m pretty sure she’ll be scared of anyone except me, at this point.”  
A soft hiccup and quiet hyperventilating from the baby monitor; Bucky resisted the urge to punch the table, because he’d already broken several tables that way.  
“Damn it- I was hoping we’d have some time just the two of us. When I get her back to sleep, want to go through the rest of that intel from your raid? See if any of it is in the old cyphers I recognize.”  
Steve’s blue eyes were adorably hopeful. “Decoding and then Mario Kart?”  
“You know I beat you ten times out of ten, right?”  
“Mm.” He very deliberately licked some sauce off his fork. “Maybe I like that.”  
He was blushing, which made Bucky want to kiss him until he blushed more- but there was a helpless ex-asset in the other room who’d be sobbing her heart out in a few minutes, and he knew where his responsibilities lay.

A voice that wasn’t her superior officer’s cutting through the darkness, and she’d fought awake, squirming against the sheer weight of her limbs. She didn’t remember what she’d dreamed about, but the sweat that made her jammies stick to her skin and the way her heart was pounding felt like dead giveaways.  
“Hey, Rikki. You up- you hungry?”  
She shook her head quickly, even though just that small movement made the room seem to spin. “I heard Handler Mr. Steve talking, but I couldn’t tell what he was saying... is he mad at you? Does he think you’re doing a bad job keeping me in line? You should probably just drug me, I don’t want him to be mad at you.” People- handlers- had done terrible things to her superior officer. They joked about it and showed each other pictures on their phones when they thought she wasn’t looking; look at the expression on his face, look what we made him do, look what he fell for!   
People were bad enough. She couldn’t give them a reason to be any worse. “I’ll do better, I’ll get more things done, I promise-“ And, to demonstrate, she struggled to her feet. Well, that had been the goal. But in reality, she sat up, and the effort made her so dizzy that she fell back down. She could fight off twenty fully-grown hydra agents, and she couldn’t even manage to get out of bed! It wasn’t fair!  
“Rikki.” His calm voice cut through all the panic in her head. “You trust me, right?”  
“Of course I do,” she said seriously. She didn’t even know if she could trust anyone else.   
“I promise, you’re doing nothing wrong. All I want you to do is get some sleep. You’ll feel better in the morning, okay?”

He talked to her while she ate a protein bar; she chewed as slowly as she could, but in the end hunger won, and she shoved the whole thing in her mouth.

“Ten out of ten snack-eating. Maybe tomorrow you’ll be feeling well enough to hang out in the kitchen, yeah?”  
Don’t go, she wanted to say, I can’t protect you if you leave.  
But instead, as her eyes fell closed, she had to watch him walk away. Where the handlers out there could do anything to him, and she wouldn’t even know.  
  
“Hey. Hey Mr. Winter Soldier Superior Officer sir.”

“Hey yourself, Rikki.”

She actually looked awake; eyes fully open, no dark circles under them, sitting all the way up instead of slouching propped up on pillows. “Do you ever watch movies? One of the handlers let me watch his movies with him if I was good, sometimes... I like Star Wars. What can I do to earn watching a movie?”  
“Okay,” he said, pretending to think before producing a plate: “How about you finish this grilled cheese sandwich?”  
She took little bites, and even her chewing seemed to be in slow-motion, but she managed to finish half of it. As she put down her fork, she eyed the plate with suspicion.  “...I still have to eat it when it gets cold, right?”

“Nope. I’ll make you a new one.”

Her expression was confused, and not just because it took her a few seconds to focus on his face. “But that’s not a reward I earned.”

“Medical maintenance, civilian protocol. Sooner you get used to it, the better an undercover operative you’ll be,” he said reflexively. Just like Steve had needed to coax him into things at first: c’mon, taking care of you makes me happy, I’ll sleep better if I know you’re on a bed and not on the floor. Different wording, same little white lies.

“…kay,” Rikki said, and “I’ll do my best,” before falling back to sleep once more.  Later that afternoon, she ate another half a sandwich, a pudding cup- and then managed, insisting “I can do it! You don’t need to spot me!” the entire way, to walk to the living room and flop down on the couch. She stayed awake for most of the movie- and slept peacefully through the rest.

Maybe she was starting to turn the corner at last, he thought- and the next day, when he woke up to the noise of her pounding on his bedroom door, only confirmed his hopes. She’d managed to put her hair in pigtails by herself, and even gotten herself a popsicle from the freezer.

“Mr. winter soldier, sir? I’m ready to start training now. Can we go to the gym, can I go swimming-“ and, sniffing her sweat-soaked pajama top, “I smell really stinky. How do I turn the shower on?”  
He wanted to swoop her up in his arms and spin around the room with her, but she probably would be disoriented; he put his hands in his pajama pockets and beamed down at her instead. “So you’re feeling a little better?”  
She nodded, wide-eyed. Her pigtails were frizzy and lopsided, pajamas stained from sweat, but that wasn’t important. “And hungry.”  
She was resilient, he thought, just like him.  
  
Over the next few days, Stark gave her the access codes for the roof garden and a tablet; as much as she loved wandering between the kitchen and the pool, she was just as content spending a few hours sitting against a tree playing educational puzzle or memory games. Even though she wasn’t at full strength- her workouts were short and easy because otherwise she’d push herself until she fainted, and she took a few spontaneous naps per day, usually waking in a panic- but it meant he could leave the tower for a few hours, knowing she’d be okay till he returned.

One of the first things he’d figured out how to use the Internet for was googling Steve Rogers Captain America, and one of the first things he’d laughed at was those dumbassedly earnest PSAs his best friend had made.  
He’d been sure he’d never do anything similar- and then one evening, after singlehandedly subduing some white supremacists who thought they could attack a Brooklyn synagogue on the anniversary of his mother’s death- he’d gone into a local hospital for his stab wounds.  
The fluorescent lights made his head buzz, the wailing of overtired children set his teeth on edge, but better that than take the subway back uptown with this knife in his ribs.  
They’d given him a clipboard for his insurance information. He’d spent a few minutes trying to make sense of it before scrawling I’M BUCKY BARNES across the page. After all, there was only one man in New York with a vibranium-alloy arm that doubled as a WiFi hotspot, even if he was currently wearing the holographic sleeve that made it look like skin.  
So a nurse who looked about five minutes away from her next cigarette break called him into a back room, and then-  
  
Next thing he knew, he’d been waking up in the medbay. The lights were at half-power, the sheets under him felt crisp and clean, his side itched in a way that meant someone had put in a couple of stitches, and Steve was leaning over him, a look of concern on his face.

“So apparently you broke out of a hospital and punched a cop,” Steve said. “And I say apparently because, you being passed out from blood loss on the front door of the tower, we had to skim through security footage and guess.”

“Huh. News to me,” Bucky said, before tugging Steve down so he could just bury his face in that comforting, familiar smell. “Uh. Any idea why?”

“From what we know, one of the nurses tried to put an IV in your arm without warning you first. When you freaked out, she assumed you were some sort of homeless drug user. Let’s just say that things… progressed from there.”

“Jesus fuck,” he said with his face pressed into Steve’s T-shirt. And then he could have stayed like that for hours, knowing that he was home and safe and odds were no one was still chasing him, except: “Did I kill anyone?”

“No, you were mostly just focused on getting the hell out of there… they realized who you were after you karate-chopped the weapon out of a security guard’s hand.”

“Good for them,” Bucky said sarcastically, even as he was aware that his body had started trembling. Things could have gone so wrong so easily. And what about people who didn’t have metal arms to shield them from bullets?

“You’re here now. It’s okay,” Steve said quietly, stroking his hair. And for a few days he’d just stayed in the tower, not trusting himself to leave, entertaining himself with family sessions and team board game nights. But then Steve had just casually mentioned:   
“You know, there’s an uptown nonprofit working on that sort of stuff.”  
“What, punching nurses?”  
“Standards of trauma-informed care, apparently. Making sure doctors know enough to not just touch people without warning them, training patient advocates to help people who can’t punch cops get a word in edgewise.”  
“I don’t want to go into a hospital. Don’t want to have to talk to people or make PSAs either,” Bucky said, scowling.  
“Yeah, but I made a phone call, and it turns out they need people to help with spreadsheets. Inputting survey results.” He sat down beside Bucky. “You want a backrub?”

“Is that even a question?”

So: maybe it was Steve’s deft hands working on his shoulders that made him so amiable to the next suggestion.  
“Get out of the tower, meet some people who aren’t trying to kill you... what do you think?”  
“I’ll give it a try, I guess.” By which he meant: I’ll go once, tops, probably to prove I hate it.   
Two months and a few levels of Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing, and he could plop down at the swivel chair in his corner of the office, stick in an AirPod, and input an entire stack of patient surveys in two hours flat.  
Everyone has been great about pretending their new volunteer isn’t the guy who’s had his snarling face splashed all over the national news.  
Lisa at the front desk, neon stiletto nails bright against her olive skin- “Afternoon, honey, how’s it going?”  
“Oh, you know, it’s going. How’s the kids?”  
Ari, who’s a part-time student at NYU and handles the social media, their choppy hair a different shade of blue each week.  
“Hey, James. Didja grab me Starbucks?”  
“Secret menu cotton candy cloud Frappuccino with whipped creme, just how you like it.”  
He could eat breakfast with Rikki, call her from the office at lunch, and be home in time for an afternoon snack.  
By the end of the week, she was doing much better. She slept through the night, more or less, and seemed much more alert when she was awake.  
“How would you feel about maybe taking a field trip outside the tower- actually, what would you think of making a new friend? Not a handler, just an operative. Maybe a future teammate.”  
“I’d be down, yeah.”  
“Good to know. I’ll make some calls, I’m pretty sure he’s going to be as pumped to hang out with you as I’ve been.” Plus, he knew exactly who he was going to call.   
  
Thirteen was around the age where most modern kids complained about being too old for stories or being tucked in; Rikki listened intently to a chapter from “Five-Minute Exciting Stories from History,” hugging her knees beneath the quilt.  
“What’d I get a story as a reward for tonight?”  
“Brushing your teeth, and I didn’t even have to remind you.”  
“I used my self-care app, like you said,” Rikki said smugly.  
He nodded; she’d picked it up faster than he had, honestly. “And you remember, if you have a bad dream-“  
She rolled her eyes. It was the most “teenage” thing he’d ever seen her do. “I know. You want me well-rested, so it’s not imposing if I come into you and Handler Steve’s room and ask you to tell me it was just a dream.” She recited it very by rote, but that meant she was listening.  
“Good,” he replied, and fluffed up the pillows before she slumped against them, a contented smile on her little face.

He read in the kitchen for a while, nonfiction about the possible science of creating zombies, before he was sure she was entirely asleep- and then full-on sprinted to his own bedroom, yanking his shirt off and tossing it into a corner as he went.

And, throwing himself onto the bed he shared with the most beautiful dumbass in the universe: “Okay. She’s asleep. I’m positive.”  
“Thank fuck,” Steve breathed, before ducking in to kiss him. “She’s a great kid, but I’m so glad we can finally get some time to ourselves. Not as fun drawing you if I can’t refresh my memory of how gorgeous you are every so often.”  
“Yeah? You missed me, is that it?” he murmured, tracing the rugged contours of Steve’s face with a teasing finger.  
Even with the lights dimmed, he knew Steve was blushing. “I mean... hey, would you like to feel how much?”  
“That’s smooth, I’m actually impressed,” he quipped, and, as his hand snaked down Steve’s boxers, “But not as impressed as I am by this…“

Stuff had been weird the first year or so in regards to their physical relationship. Like: okay, is that kink something I’m actually into, or just some programming that was thrown into my brain for shits and giggles?  
(Thank god Shuri had no idea what anything she’d removed from his brain actually was.)  
And like: Do I feel good about this act because I enjoy it and it feels good, or because I think I’m placating my handler?  
He’d talked about it a lot with Steve and Nat and his therapist. And they’d gone slow- him and Steve and Nat, that was. Obviously not his therapist.  
Even after he’d found ways to anchor his panicky mind in the present, he’d still spent months doubting his own body, his own responses; could he really trust his memories of what he and Steve had allegedly done before the war, when so much else had turned out to be false? And yet. He’d come so far since that day two years ago, when the gentle voice of the man he’d been ordered to kill had sparked something in his empty mind.

The fact was, though, no matter how much either of them had changed, no matter how many years had passed, he could still take this beautiful dumbass apart without even trying.

“Come on, gorgeous… stop teasing me, yeah?” Steve managed, breathless, his chest heaving under Bucky’s touch.

“Oh, I don’t know. How about you make me?” Bucky said casually before mouthing at his pretty pink nipples some more.

“Okay.” His laugh was more like a gasp. “So I feel like that’s a vote for maybe… pulling your hair until I’ve got that gorgeous mouth of yours right where I want it?”

“Dare you,” Bucky shot right back, grinning at him. Then Steve’s hand was in his hair, and a good night was about to get even better-

And, right as he was thinking about how lucky he was, how perfect his life was at this very moment, a shrieking ginger goblin charged into the room and hurled one of the free weights from the gym right at Steve’s head.  


	6. because rage. and grief. and survive.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so what happens in this chapter is that rikki, having heard hydra members talk up how they've assaulted and dehumanized the winter soldier, jumps to conclusions. and then uses those conclusions as a springboard from which to jump to even MORE conclusions.   
> anti-anxiety medication is also given to a patient who's not thinking clearly enough to make an informed decision about it. those are some warns.

Instinctively, Bucky flipped off the bed, scrambling across the room to take cover under his desk. There was a secret panel in the underside that would allow him to instantly reach a small-caliber sidearm, and he braced his hand against it.  
Steve caught the weight, of course- reflexively snatching the metal disk out of the air- but he didn’t catch Rikki as she hurled herself at him feet-first, kicking him off the bed.  
“No!” she yelled, pouncing on him before he could get to his feet. “You are not allowed to hurt him!” Her fists flew, but he blocked just as rapidly- until she slammed her head into his nose. The impact seemed to startle her as well, though, and he used that moment of hesitation to push her away- or would have, if she hadn’t found an opening to twist to the side and knee him in the neck, then pound his head against the floor.  
He’d seen Cap recover instantly from less- knew he was faking unconsciousness to see what Rikki would do next, the same way he stayed motionless and glanced up at her, ready to follow her lead. Was this a programmed plan to go through with her original orders to assassinate Captain America? But then… why was she being protective of him? What did she want? The last thing he wanted was to hurt her.   
Rikki dropped into a crouch to meet his gaze. “We have to get out, now. They won’t believe he was doing anything to you, or they’ll say you deserved it. Or they’ll wipe you until you forget and tell you I’m lying.” She tugged on his arm, as if convinced she could move him. “Come on, we have to go!”  
“What’s your plan?” he asked, curious in an almost horrified way despite himself.  
“We rip off his hand- or arm, whatever you think would be easier. Get weapons, cause yours are probably biometrically handler-locked- and then you go and I take out their security system, and by the time they realize you’re missing you won’t even be in the US anymore.”  
There was something missing in that plan, though. “And you’d stay behind.”  
“Duh. One of us has to occupy the strike teams. C’mon, he’s gonna wake up!”  
“What about you?” he couldn’t help but wonder aloud.   
She shook her head. “They said I didn’t have to worry about that until I was eighteen, they said I had time. And if that was a lie, they should have tried something by now. Could’ve ages ago. And they won’t kill me, either. Not if I said I was just following orders.”

She thought… oh, god. And all of a sudden, everything was perfectly clear. He knew exactly what she thought was happening. But before he could reassure her, before he could get through to her, Steve stumbled to his feet, leaning against the wall for balance.  
“Rikki. I want you to know I’m not mad, not even disappointed, just very mildly concussed. If we could all sit down and talk things out-“  
“Shut up!” Rikki screamed, charging at him.   
She aimed a spinning kick at her head; he caught her foot, pushing her effortlessly back so that she had to overbalance to stay standing.  
“Rikki, please- listen, I know Hydra has probably told you a few things about what people do in bedrooms with pants off, but-“  
“They sure have!” she yelled. “But he said you were different- you lied to him! I hate you, I hate you so much!”  
And with that, she leapt at him once more.  
The fight would have been over instantly if Steve had any intention of fighting back. He gave as much ground as he needed, dodged or blocked all her frantic attacks. And when he couldn’t block without counterattacking, he just absorbed the blows. The look of concern he gave Bucky was very clear: Please get your tiny, terrifying murder child.  
As a result, Bucky edged back towards the desk.   
There was something else in the drawer: sedatives. For if he had a nightmare and woke up not knowing where he was, attacked Steve and made a break for it, or just needed some chemical help calming down. He couldn’t think of anything else that would get Rikki out of her murderous rage. A small percentage of the dose that made his thoughts comfortably far-away would certainly be enough to knock the tiny girl out. A little dial on the back of the injector adjusted the dose, and Bucky slid it down to the right number. She was so occupied with trying to get through Steve’s defenses, it was no trouble at all to sneak behind her and scoop her up.  
“No!” she cried, flailing her limbs, a note of real panic in her voice. “Please don’t do this to me. I’m trying to help. If he hurts you, and then you can’t go back on active duty-“  
At once he knew what she thought he was doing. “Rikki. Listen to me, sweetheart. We’re not going to put you down, I promise.”  
What he wanted to say was: I love you, and I want to kill everyone who’s contributed to putting that terror in your eyes. Instead, he did his best to use words that someone who had never known love, who didn’t even know what the word means, would understand. “You’re a valued asset, okay? You’re my sniper, and I know you have my back. It’s just going to make you a little sleepy so you’ll stop trying to kill Steve here, and we can all sit down and talk.”  
She squirmed to look over her shoulder at him, eyes wide. “But he was hurting you! Even if he said it was for your own good or just for maintenance or a checkup or something, even if he was going to give you a reward afterwards! He was pulling your hair- I’ll pull his eyes out-“ And she began struggling again, her movements so frantic and unpredictable that he could barely keep a hold on her. Somehow, he managed to place the injector against her thigh and click the button down, even as she almost whacked him in the face. Just as he’d finished the injection, she managed to push off and flop onto the floor, where she attempted to struggle to her hands and knees on limbs that were barely obeying her. “I am not up past my bedtime,” Rikki said, struggling to get every word out clearly through the sedative that must be sweeping like a fog over her mind. “Even if I get chocolate-covered strawberries and marzipan afterwards- you think I’m too young and clueless but I hear what you joke about, I know what you did to him. I know what you do.” Rikki pointed at Steve, slowly lifting a wobbly arm as if it weighed a hundred pounds. “You are not allowed to have a party. I live here now.” Her words were slurred, yet the murderous fury behind them came through loud and clear. He wondered for a panicked moment if the sedative maybe hadn’t worked, if he’d have to hurt her in order to keep her from hurting anyone else. Then she slumped to the ground. He hurried to check on her. Breathing slowing, pulse steadier; okay, thank fuck.

Steve rubbed his eyes, collapsing onto the bed. “She thought…”

“Yeah,” Bucky finished. He lifted Rikki easily; even after days of just resting and eating, there was a little more color in her cheeks, but she still weighed practically nothing. Odds were she’d panic a little bit less if she woke up in her own room, even if the door was locked from the outside. “And- you missed it while you were passed out, but she was willing to die if it meant I could escape.”


	7. you are real, and you are mine (steve POV interlude)

“I’m glad, though,” Bucky said into his mug. They were sitting at the kitchen table, drinking hot chocolate (Bucky) and strong tea (Steve,) planning their strategy for when Rikki awoke. “Now we know they saved the worst of it for me... that at least there was one line Hydra couldn’t cross and still convince themselves they were the good guys. They could starve her, drug her, make her think no one would ever love her because she wasn’t a person, but at least they didn’t-“ he’d been playing with the elastic that had held up his bun, and then it snapped. “Damn it,” he said quietly, and stared at the broken hair thing like he had no idea what to do with it. “Look at this, I fucked it up. I fucked it all up.”

Steve covered Bucky’s hands with his own, stroking, coaxing, until his husband released his grip on the broken hair thing. “Bucky. Look at me, yeah? It’s okay. We’re going to be okay. Not just you and me, but us as a family. The three of us.”

He looked skeptical, exhausted; wholly vulnerable in a way that made Steve want to bury a hand in the softness of his hair, kiss his tears away before they could even run down his face. “Even though she tried to kill you?”

“She was protecting you,” Steve said firmly. “I’d do the same.”

He’d thought about what he would have done… if it had been him, not a SHIELD team under Coulson and May, responsible for bringing in the agents that had worked with Bucky. The ones who had used him as a gala centerpiece.

He would have needed to go as Nomad. There were some missions not meant for the flag and the shield. Some deeds that could only be done in the dark.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this demanded to be its own chapter for no particular reason, so I let it   
> Steve Rogers went by "Nomad" for four issues in the 1970s; the identity might be featured in Endgame.


	8. held me like a father holds rage, arms tight across as lifejacket

From the quiet on the baby monitor, Bucky had assumed that Rikki was still knocked out. Walking into her bedroom, though, he saw that she was awake, staring up at the ceiling.

“Hi, Rikki. I brought you blueberries.”  
She didn’t sit up or curl onto her side, just turned her head a little to glance at him. “They’re poisoned, aren’t they? That’s okay. I’ll eat them anyway. I want to be good.”  
“No, they’re not poisoned, look-“ He had taken a handful; Rikki cut him off.  
“No. If you want to prove it, let me pick.” She pointed to a random section of the bowl. “Eat those.”  
He did; Rikki watched, eyes narrowed, as he chewed and swallowed. At last she nodded. “Right- your pulse and breathing are steady, so they probably aren’t poisoned. Probably is good enough.” She sounded utterly listless, as if she was just waiting to die. Bucky had a mental image that if he sat her up right now, she’d just flop back over, like a rag doll.   
“Do you want to go out on the roof?” he offered. She’d been up to the roof garden a few days ago, and enjoyed scribbling with chalk on the bricks, learning how to play jacks and hopscotch, and using her tablet to identify all the plants.   
At that she seemed to take an interest, sitting up; something almost a smile momentarily played over her lips. “They won’t be able to kill me if we’re on the roof. People might see. And the city would ask questions if anyone threw my body off to go splat on the bottom, even if it would probably be a strategically ‘vantageous thingy to threaten me with.” And, glancing longingly back at the bed as she slid off it: “Can I bring my blanket?”  
“All the blankets you want. It’s cold this time of night, anyway- that’s not a reward, it’s equipping yourself properly for the mission terrain.”

She wrapped herself in the pink knitted blanket that had been folded neatly at the foot of her bed- there had been a sale on pink yarn- before yanking off the floral quilt and handing it to Bucky. “You should hold the quilt. It’s more flame-resistant. And you can melt it in someone’s face if they’ve got a flamethrower.”  
“Thank you, Rikki. That’s very thoughtful.”  
She nodded, her lips pressed tightly together, but he couldn’t tell what specifically had made her uncomfortable. Maybe just receiving a compliment in general, when every aspect of her childhood had taught her to expect a harsh punishment for the slightest infraction.

Benches and a picnic table, next to a fountain so big you could climb in it and cool off, presented an inviting space to play board games or enjoy drinks and dessert during the day. Steve and Nat often had the Fantastic Four up for cocktails, on the rare occasions when everyone was around and could find another metahuman to cover their territory at the same time; he’d make the required polite conversation and then retreat to the carpet of moss under willows, or the trellis arbor of roses and lilacs with wind chimes and a table and chairs underneath. A rainwater-collecting water tower with the Avengers symbol spraypainted on it provided enough nourishment for all the plants, and rows of hardy wildflowers blocked out the rest of the world. It was too early for the garden plot to be producing anything, but come the summer, there would be Jersey heirloom tomatoes, fresh mint and basil, and all the blueberries he could eat. 

During the work day, lab assistants and Shield operatives who were working in the tower often came up to the garden for breaks; on the weekends, Stark let a charity use the space to host coding events for low-income kids. But at night, the garden just belonged to the Avengers and their friends.

Rikki had spread her cotton candy and magenta pink blanket over the roots of a willow tree, and fidgeted absently with a trailing branch.

“I want to apologize, Rikki.” That felt like as good a place to begin as anywhere else.

“You didn’t do anything wrong. I’m sure you fought back as hard as you could.” Her voice had a hoarse low undertone from continuous shrieking, and her red-rimmed eyes looked enormous under the moonlight.

No, you see… there’s a lot of things I haven’t told you because I figured Hydra wouldn’t have given you the framework to understand them. That you’d have no idea what I was going on about, and that I’d do more harm than good by trying to tell you the truth.

It was almost hard to believe that this small girl in Necco wafer pink and blue two-piece jammies printed with tiny cartoon gnomes, with little flower-shaped snaps halfway down the front of the shirt, was one of the most dangerous altered humans on earth. “It was a need-to-know basis,” she said with a shrug. “People don’t tell me things lots of the time.”

“But by keeping that information from you, you ended up jumping to conclusions. You were frightened and angry, and you thought Steve and I weren’t on your side.”

“He’s a handler,” Rikki replied quietly. The subtext: how good can he be? Could a handler ever really be on the side of an asset?

That was what Hydra had taught her- _almost every adult will hurt me, even if I don’t know why. Even if I don’t do anything to provoke it._ And that she deserved it. That this lanky tween would be fated to fight a one-girl war against the world, never knowing who her allies truly were. He just hoped he’d have the patience to help her learn that things could be different.  

“Right. That’s what I’m talking about- you feel like you have to protect me, to keep him from hurting me. But the fact is? I knew Steve long before I was the Winter Soldier. Before I was even any kind of soldier in the first place.”

She pulled her knees to her chest and just stared at him, high forehead wrinkled. “But…” That one word hung in the cool night air for what seemed like minutes before she followed it up with another. “How?”

He sat down beside her and opened his scrapbook.

The project had been one of the first things he’d done after coming to the tower, when he didn’t want to do anything that involved leaving the floor or Steve’s side.

“Look, these all have us in them,” Steve said. He’d dumped an armload of reading material onto Bucky’s bed: coffee table books, reproduction newspapers, visual dictionaries. “Us, or places we’ve been to together. How about every time you see something you think you recognize, you can put it in the scrapbook, and then decorate the page?”

It had started with clumsily smearing a gluestick and scribbling in the margins, sometimes so fervently he broke the pencil point. And then it had slowly evolved into a pathway for the emergence of memories that had him smiling so hard his face hurt, and- to his surprise- a legitimate talent for scrapbooking.

He opened the scrapbook to one of the middle pages. Sketches by Steve. Two young men sitting on a park bench eating popsicles. The Barnes family- and a skinny blonde guest- eating on a kitchen table made from two-by-fours and an upside-down bathtub. A room in the New York Public Library, right before closing from the light through the windows, with two scribbled figures sitting next to other at one of the big tables, a few lines suggesting that they were leaning over the same large book.

“For starters- you recognize anyone in this picture?” He pointed to the first one.

Rikki squinted. “The one who’s trying to grow a mustache looks a bit like you.”

“That’s because it is me.” And he had been trying to grow a mustache, with limited success. Right up til enlistment, he’d insisted it made him look like William Powell in The Thin Man, to predictable stifled howls of laughter from Stevie.

“But… how? And when? Those look so old-fashioned!”

“You were Hydra’s first attempt at cloning, right? I always knew I came from somewhere, even if I didn’t give any thought to it. Turns out where I came from was just a few miles over in Brooklyn, in a crowded apartment that was cold in the winter and hot in the summer.”

“So who’s that?” Rikki interrupted, pointing to the figure’s blonde-haired companion.

“That… is the man who became Captain America.”

At that Rikki burst out in giggles. “You’re kidding! Right? I mean, he’s even smaller than I am!”

“Nope. They used science to make him get a lot bigger. Thing was, even when he was tiny and sick all the time, he never, ever could run away from a fight. That’s where I came in…”

And he told Rikki a few stories about the trouble they’d gotten into as boys. Chasing down some older kids who’d stolen penny candy from a street urchin, foiling a schoolyard bully’s attempt to blackmail a classmate into helping him cheat on a test, Steve starting a full-on brawl with a passerby who’d called Bucky a fairy like it was a bad thing, and having to be dragged out of the fight kicking and screaming.

Rikki had just been listening, wide-eyed, but something about that last story sparked understanding in her. “So you were Captain America’s handler when you were both little?”  
The funny thing was, though, that was a bit true. Material and equipment support? He’d taken loads of extra hours of work to make sure Steve had warm mittens and socks every winter. Physical maintenance? “I know you ain’t hungry, but I can’t eat another bite,” he remembered saying on umpteen nights, tone deliberately casual. “Just one mouthful- how about it, yeah?” The only handler thing he’d never done was sending him into battle, when it had been so much effort just to get him out. “That’s one way of putting it. Mostly I just kept him out of trouble, kept him alive...”  
She nodded, intent. “Right. A good handler.”  
Rikki meant well with the comparison, though, and he couldn’t help but smile back.  “More or less.”  
He turned to another page of the scrapbook. Newspaper headlines, mostly. “In wartime, though? I was his marksman. There are some things you can’t do when you’re wearing your country’s symbol on your chest. I did those, too.”

Strategy, battles, combat- that was what really got Rikki’s attention. He told a story about helping some escaped concentration camp prisoners, another about taking a valley, and she pressed him for detail on every aspect of the fight, fascinated.

“So when our relief from the Howlies showed up to take the prisoners to safety in their submarine, of course they asked us if we were going with them. But Steve and I? All we needed was to be resupplied. We were just getting started.”

“You really trusted him, didn’t you,” Rikki murdered.

He nodded. “Even when I had no idea who he was.”  
During his time with Hydra, some part of him had remembered kind blue eyes and sunlight hair; they’d used this instinctual trust to try and manipulate him by choosing handlers who looked like Steve. Young Alexander Pierce, for instance; the Winter Soldier had fallen instinctively into step from the set of his chin alone. But it had never quite felt right. “I knew there was someone out there who was kind to me. Even if I couldn’t remember his name, even if I’d only dreamed him up.” He leaned back against the tree, sensing Rikki’s steady breathing beside him.  “Project Insight... it was supposed to be my last mission. They promised they’d let me die afterwards. Not cryo, not the chair, just going to sleep and never having to wake up afterwards.” To a man unable to imagine freedom or kindness, that had sounded like paradise. A reprieve from being hurt.  
“Last Reward,” Rikki said softly, nodding. “They said I had at least a century of service in me, but I’d earn it eventually.”  
A twig he’d been fidgeting with snapped in his hand. The fact that, at thirteen, she was already so calm about her own death... it could have broken him if there was anything untouched left to break. “I was ready,” he explained. “To just stop fighting and go somewhere no one would hurt me anymore. But when I saw him? All of a sudden, I wanted to keep living. If it meant fighting for him, to protect him? Then I was ready to fight for the rest of my life.”  
  
Rikki turned away from him, rubbing her eyes; not just exhaustion, but tears. “You’ve worked so hard to be a real person, to make a real life here. I could have taken all of that away from you. I could’ve killed him,” she wailed. It was a visible effort to stifle her sobs just enough to get words out. “If you never want to see me again, I’d understand just fine- I’m a screw-up and irresponsible and I’m no good at following orders, I’m just no good. Those last words were a sob as she curled her knees into her chests and slammed a fist against her head, shoulders shaking as she sobbed.  
“Hey! Stop hitting yourself. You’re damaging Avengers property.”  
“Fine, I’ll wait for someone else to do it.” And she curled up into an angry little ball.  
Even though she seemed determined to shut out the world- limbs trembling with tension, curls spilling over to hide her face- he knew she could hear him.  
“Rikki, sweetheart. All you could have done was act on the information you had. You thought he was my handler and he was touching me inappropriately, right?” He tried to keep the frustration out of his voice, knowing she’d jump to conclusions again and think he was frustrated with her, not with himself.  
“That’s what it looked like,” she muttered, words muffled.  
“The fact that you wanted to protect me... you would have sacrificed anything for me, even though you thought I was too brainwashed to understand why. And, honestly, you have no idea how much that means to me-“  
She lifted her head for an instant: scowled, rocking back and forth. “You don’t have to lie to me. I know you’re angry. Just give me a task or a punishment, or something, and get it over with, all right? Mr. Steve is angry at me, so I know you are, too.”  
Okay. Now they were getting to a point, something he could take action on: “What could I tell you to prove he isn’t?”  
“Let him speak for himself. As soon as you’re not here to protect me, I bet he’ll tell you how he really feels.” Tears glittered in her eyes as she curled in on herself, her quiet words almost a snarl of fury.  
“Okay,” Bucky said, standing. “I’ll go get him. I know he’s still up.”  
Would Rikki ever realize that she was loved unconditionally? That no one in Avengers Tower would ever blame her for acting on the skewed ideas of how the world worked that Hydra had instilled in her vulnerable mind? That, in a single short week, she had already become one of the most important people in his life- that he was just as willing to die for her as she was for him?  
He wanted to offer her a hug, dry her tears with a corner of the soft fleece blanket, brush her curls until they fluffed out and shone- but he didn’t want to offer something she was too fragile to refuse. He parted the curtain of willow branches and headed towards the stairs.

 

“You’re angry at me,” Rikki said the second Steve came into the willow arbor. “Don’t lie to me. I may not be a person, maybe I’m just an asset, but I’m not stupid. That’s why they don’t fry my brain or give me freezer burn. I’m fucking smart.”  
He’d worn a fuzzy bathrobe and matching slippers, hoping the soft fabric would make his bulk look less intimidating; now he was just glad he had something to pull tighter around himself, as if to shield himself from the chill of her gaze. “You were prepared to kill me to protect Bucky.”  
“Yeah. So?” She looked defiant. Not fearless, though. More like someone who was scared as shit and trying to hide it with anger.   
“I don’t think you would’ve stopped there. Iron Man, the Hulk, an actual god... you would have fought them all, too, if you had to. Am I right?”  
That actually got a little smile out of her. “And Shield. And I would have won, too... or at least bought him enough time to get away, made everyone so busy with me they wouldn’t even think about looking for him. At least an hour and a half before they killed me. Maybe even two.” And she stuck out her little chin as if daring Steve to throw an army at her and prove her right.

Jesus fucking Christ.   
How was it that Rikki, who had no DNA in common with him, was such a perfect mimic of himself as a child? He’d known what his limits were. Being five feet tall, unable to go up a flight of stairs without stopping to catch his breath. Yet whenever he saw someone in trouble, he charged right into the fray. This scrawny girl with bright red hair in uneven braids had known the odds against her survival.

She just hadn’t cared.  
She’d tried to kill him twice, nearly succeeded on both occasions- and he loved her with a ferocity that startled him, sudden as the shock of icemelt drowning. Loved her so much that he remembered what it was like to forget how to breathe: I will do anything it takes to keep you safe.  
He’d been just looking at her for a while, and she clearly noticed.

“What are you thinking?” she asked, shoulders hunching unobtrusively as if bracing for a blow.   
“That I respect you, and I’d be honored to fight alongside you someday.”  
“Really?” She still looked suspicious, but interested as well, despite herself. “Even though I nearly killed you, and it wasn’t even on following orders this time?”  
“You thought I was hurting someone you cared about. You could’ve just gone back to sleep, pulled the pillow over your head, pretended you hadn’t done anything, right?”  
“No,” she said instantly, scowling. “It wouldn’t‘ve been fair.” That same expression, on Bucky’s face, usually had one meaning: you absolute dumbass.  
He nodded. “Exactly. I don’t like bullies either. Not Hydra, not Thanos- hell, I’ve knocked Iron Man himself around once or twice when he needed to get his head deflated. And you know what else we have in common?”  
“What?”  
“Good taste in the people we’d die for.”  
It took a moment- and then Rikki beamed up at him. Not because she was scared of him, he knew, but because she’d finally realized that maybe- just maybe- they were on the same side.


	9. here, your own smoldering daughter

“Hey Barnes. Hey, Barnes. Pick up the phone! Beep beep, it’s your local genius speaking…”

Stark had, somehow, changed his ringtone on everyone’s password-protected phones to this annoying little ditty. It echoed in the pool room, louder than even the waterfall.

Bucky emerged from the water and dried his hand off on a towel before pressing a button to accept the call. Sure, the phone was allegedly waterproof, but he wasn’t taking chances.

“Why are you calling me? I’m two floors down from you,” Bucky said by way of a greeting.

“Long story- let’s just say I’m working on some, uh, pretty volatile chemicals. Trust me, you want me in the same room as these right now.” A nervous chuckle.

Hopefully he wouldn’t explode the lab again. He always sulked after doing that.

Stark continued: “Okay, so: first off, she’s your kid, but I’m guessing you knew that already.”

Bucky let out a breath. Thank fuck. If he had to fight for her in court, if Hydra or a dummy company hired actors to pretend to be her relatives or something like that, having matching DNA would be a point in his favor. “So, a pretty straightforward clone?”

“Nope! 40, maybe 45 percent of your DNA. She’s got an X-gene. I can’t tell whether or not it’s activated, though. Xavier’s researchers would know; we’ll have to ask them.”

Poor kid. Rikki was already dealing with so much in life; being a mutant wasn’t going to make anything easier. “Okay, though… that leaves at least 30 percent of DNA, right? Any matches on that?” Hopefully, Rikki wasn’t descended from someone like the Red Skull; she’d be devastated if she ever found out.

“Instant match, actually. I knew Hydra loaned you out to the Red Room to train operatives, but I had no idea the Red Room would ever loan someone out for something like this.”

“What are you talking about?” he demanded, gripping the side of the pool so hard that his hand hurt.

“Well, knowing Natasha, she’s going to be over the moon about this.”

The warm water against his skin. The scent of chlorine; the clock on his phone changing minute to minute. He realized Stark was speaking.

“Hey. Hey, Barnes, you all right? Need me to call Cap for you? Shit, seriously, are you okay?”

“Yeah,” he said. Hung up the phone, pushed off the side of the pool, spent a while just drifting around on his back looking at the sun filtering in through the skylight.

He’d trained agents for the Red Room during the cold war as part of a long-term project intended to destabilize American democracy, imprinted on the young woman whose kindness startled him. 

It was one of the memories that had started to come back first- recognizing Natasha as more than just one of Steve’s allies. The woman with sunset-flame hair and steady hands digging shrapnel out of his shoulder, speaking softly to him like he was a person. The force of her unleashed grin when she’d gotten a move right or pulled off an especially complex shot. (He didn’t remember what had ended up happening, maybe wouldn’t… but apparently they’d tried to escape together. Their handlers had punished him, wiped him, made her watch.)

If there was anyone in his life he’d want to be the mother of his genetically engineered lab-grown child, it was impossible to make a better choice than the woman who was one of his best friends in the whole world.


	10. there is a war in each of us/yours has a peculiar scent

At first, Bucky had felt screamingly, burningly jealous of Sam Wilson. Sam had it all: his own place, pet birds, healthy coping mechanisms that he remembered to use. He moved through life with the easy confidence of someone who knew that, in any given space, half the people wanted to be him and the other half had crushes on him, and he and Steve had a ton of inside jokes. They laughed together at things Bucky couldn’t even comprehend.  
But- you could be jealous of Sam, but you couldn’t stay jealous. He was just a good, down-to-Earth guy, and the more people who could make Steve smile nowadays, the better. He’d be able to win Rikki’s trust for sure... and, if worst came to worst, he’d be able to defend himself against her supersoldier combat skills until help arrived.   
  
“Hey, what’s up? You okay?” Sam sounded a little out of breath- he’d probably picked up the phone mid-workout.  
Bucky went to run a hand through his hair, remembered he’d already pulled it into a bun. “I am, but someone else isn’t.”  
“Sounds serious. What’s the sitrep? Lay it on me.”  
“It’s a long story. Basically, though, we need someone who can provide emergency mental health stuff- mostly emergency babysitting, honestly- to a thirteen-year-old kid,” he said, glancing towards the kitchen. Rikki and Steve had just gotten up, and had apparently reached a cautious truce; they were eating pancakes together at the kitchen table. He knew without even checking that Steve had drenched his in margarine, which he still insisted was better than butter, and made them from scratch.

(“We don’t need to buy a mix, Bucky. You can get everything separately for cheaper- it’s a waste of money.”

“Stevie. We’re living in a literal skyscraper owned by a millionaire.”

“So? It’s still a waste. We can make our own mix, yeah?”)

The fact was, though, Rikki needed some in-between people. People who were in between “my superior officer” and “am still a little bit terrified of.” Sam seemed like the perfect choice.   
“Oof,” Sam said. “So… that’s not my specialty, but I absolutely have some contacts in that subfield. I can send you their info, get you in contact with someone ASAP-“  
Bucky cut him off. “Specifically: we need someone with Avengers-level clearance and combat skills. And that’s completely nonnegotiable.” Okay, that wasn’t entirely true- there were a few people who’d never been in the Avengers who he’d trust to be safe around Rikki. And they were all either high-level telepaths, extremely proficient in hand-to-hand-combat, and/or parents in their own right. Well, except for Squirrel Girl.   
“Woah, slow down a second. Quick question: who exactly is this child? Did Stark find Spider-Man Part Two or something?”  
“She is...” Bucky ran a hand through his hair. How to explain Rikki? How to explain a girl who fought like a seasoned killer, yet shrieked with joy over a dollar-store stuffed animal?  
“Hydra had a backup plan,” he said slowly. “In case I became intractable even with the wipes... in case I stopped cooperating with the teams they assigned to me. Or in case one of them fried my fucking brain bad enough they couldn’t fit the pieces back together.” (Hard to tell, sometimes. Hydra never did anything for just one reason.) “Her name is Rikki Barnes. Her DNA is a match for mine, she came closer to beating Cap in a one-on-one fight than I ever have, and her favorite Star Wars character is R2D2. She thinks Steve is my handler, she’s scared he might take revenge on her for trying to kill him. All I know for sure about how to help her is that she needs to be able to trust someone who isn’t me. Someone who isn’t her superior officer. And I trust you.”  
Sam was silent for a little while, taking in the responsibility. At last he replied, “So: I will absolutely be able to keep your mini-me from stabbing me with a sharpened crayon mid panic attack, and I’m completely honored that you’d choose me for the job. Do I know enough about child development and the way kids’ brains work to be of substantial help in this situation? To be honest, I’m not entirely sure. But what I can do, probably, is get you some more information about what she’s been through without it feeling like an interrogation.”  
  
How to explain to Sam, who he’s 99% sure he tried to kill at some point or other- who has every reason to have a healthy distrust of anything even remotely related to Hydra- how much more scared Rikki was of strangers than they might be of her?  
“She’s a good kid.” Stressing the words. Like he could say everything about this small messy person who’d put his heart in a chokehold with just that.

“I get it, and I can tell this is really important to you… so I’ll do my best. First thing tomorrow work for you?”

“Yeah.” It absolutely would. The thing was, he thought as he chatted with Sam, being able to go out on missions with the rest of the team had become important for his mental health. Every time he scooped a civilian out of danger, or shot down an alien robot, or punched out some anti-mutant terrorist? It helped him remember that he wasn’t just a weapon. That he could make his own choices. Choices that would let him do good in the world.

Also, hitting a Nazi so hard that their piercings fell out was cathartic as fuck.

Eventually finished with the conversation, he drifted into the kitchen, where Steve wasted no time hitting him with some news.

“So: we’ve taste-tested it. Rikki agrees that pancakes made from scratch are better.” He folded his arms across the expanse of his broad chest, glowingly proud of himself.

When the young Ms. Marvel had been part of the Avengers for a while last year, before she’d left to form her own team of fellow teenagers, the tower’s residents had hosted a potluck to welcome her to the team. The polite smile that had stayed frozen on her face as she doggedly munched down an entire serving of Steve’s chicken casserole, which was no less inedible for being made with halal ingredients? Of course he already respected her after seeing her fight, but her willingness to endure Depression-era cookery had only confirmed it.

“Pancakes made from scratch, I’m not gonna argue… just as long as you don’t inflict chicken-pickle gelatin with mayonnaise frosting on our beautiful child,” quipped Bucky, pulling out his chair.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> depression-era food was really that bad   
> https://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/the-1950s-most-nauseating-jell-o-soaked-recipes/


	11. you move through youth like any girl

A knock on the door; a tall man in casual clothing. Good physical condition, but unarmed.

The tower’s security system was good. She knew it. She’d been pouring over its weaknesses, figuring out how to sneak around unobserved. And there was no way an ordinary man could have gotten this far without some alarm going off.

Rikki cracked the door open, still ready to attack if she had to.

“Hey there, Rikki. My name is Sam. I’m a friend of your father’s. Do you do handshakes?” He smiled at her like he knew her- but she knew him, too, and said his name like it meant knowing the right answer on the test.   
“You’re Falcon. I read your dossier- you were in the army and loads of people died except you didn’t.” She winced at once, sure she’d said the wrong thing and he’d hate her. Instead he just looked thoughtful.  
“Wow, Hydra had a lot of information on all of us, huh.”  
Just need-to-know. They wouldn’t have wanted you dead if you weren’t important, she thought. But she figured she shouldn’t actually say that.  
  
“Anyway. The other Avengers have some stuff they need to have meetings about, so they asked me to keep an eye on you.”

Instinctively, she looked towards her superior officer- her father, she still had to correct herself.

Bucky nodded. “Glad you could come on such short notice, Sam- like I said, you have no idea how much I appreciate the chance to get back out there. Rikki. Be good, yeah? Civilian good.”

No murdering. Not even a little murdering. She nodded and saluted. “Sir yes sir.”  


Sam had brought crayons. The good kind, the kind she’d never been allowed to have growing up. And he let her take as many out of the box as she wanted, even without asking for permission first.

Of course she’d asked him a million questions. What sort of missions he’d gone on, if he’d ever saved anyone’s lives (yes), if he ever killed anyone. (“Not unless they were trying to kill me first, which I know is an opportunity not everyone’s had.)  
So when he finally asked her a question, instead of the other way around, she dind’t mind answering. “What are you drawing? Looks pretty cool.”  
She shrugged. “Just colors. Like an oil spill. What about you?”  
“My family. Trying to see how accurately I can draw them without checking anything against their Facebook profile pictures. There’s a whole box of crayons in different skin colors, actually.” His family had a lot of people in it, all wearing sunny-colored clothing and all smiling. The way civilians did. “I’m probably a better drawer than you are. Just saying,” he said with a grin, like he knew drawer wasn’t a real word.   
That was a challenge- and Rikki could never resist a challenge. “Oh, yeah? Well, we’ll see.”  
Sam’s picture of his family was pretty good. He could draw people, not just stick figures; Rikki concentrated extra hard on her drawing to make up for it, making sure she chose just the right shades. Did she have a family? She wasn’t sure, not quite yet. But she could at least draw the people who had raised her.   
“Who are they?” Sam asked over her shoulder.   
That’s Agent Murphy. That’s Agent Oates. She pointed to first the olive-skinned male figure, then the paler woman beside him.

“Cool. Wanna tell me about them?”

It wouldn’t hurt, probably. She settled comfy and cross-legged, spinning a crayon like it was a butterfly knife. “Murphy was my caretaker when he was a junior Agent. He didn’t hit me or anything unless I deserved it, and even then it would just be the taser. I got pretty lucky. Sometimes he let me watch Star Wars or Animal Planet and he’d give me rewards even if I hadn’t earned them. Like blueberries. Cause he didn’t like food going to waste if the base didn’t have a thingy... a compost heap.”

“And Oates?” Sam had folded the picture of his own family neatly and was doing some sort of grown-up coloring book, shading in little complicated circles.    
“She did what she was getting paid to. They didn’t pay her enough to be extra mean to me. She just followed the rules. This much food, this training routine, give the asset rewards for these behaviors. Handlers like that mean I have time to think.”  
“Yeah? What do you think about?”  
“I like animals. I had a little sparrow at one of the bases where they kept me. I fed it protein bars and it would perch on my shoulder. There was another base, I found a little rat, and it would climb up my leg and fall asleep in my hoodie pocket. There were creatures the science division was breeding. Lots of long squiggly legs and eyes that stuck out and a million teeth. And suction cups. That was a reward for me, if I did really good in training. One of the handlers would let me sit by their aquarium and sing to them.”

“That sounds fun.”  
“Uh-huh.” And, because she wanted to see what he would believe, “Until it ate someone!”   
“Great. Yeah. How about we look into getting you a pet that doesn’t eat people?”  
“I mean, technically any pet can eat people, if you train it right.”  
Then Sam raised a concerned eyebrow, and she burst into giggles.  
“Just kidding, I promise!”  
Squiddy had, in fact, ripped an unfortunate handler limb from limb, but she got the feeling that she shouldn’t tell Sam that.


	12. my love, take these walls, these wars

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> anyway this chapter contains references to bucky suffering dehumanization and abuse while in the hands of hydra!

“So Sam figured out who Rikki’s handlers are,” Bucky said the next morning, before they’d gotten out of bed.

“And?” Steve asked quietly.

A one-shouldered shrug. “Didn’t confirm my worst fears, at least. Isaac Murphy, then Cameron Oates. You knew Murphy, yeah?”

“Went on a mission together. The bar afterwards, once or twice.” He’d been a man out of time. Isolated, frightened… easy to manipulate. Willing to ignore the jokes he didn’t understand thrown his way, the occasional bit of collateral damage his teammates were fine with letting slide, because he’d assumed his every action was in the service of his country. “I wouldn’t say I knew him, though.” Some part of him had been consciously aloof from everyone, even as he smiled and laughed and kidded around with his squad. Knowing that anyone he got close to could be snatched away from him at any moment.

“I think she was spared… most of what I had to deal with.”

The way Bucky leaned against him, still except for his breathing as he searched for words to fill the silence… Steve knew he was remembering something, that the best thing he could do was just listen and be there for him. At last Bucky spoke.

“Murphy was an eco-terrorist who joined HYDRA because PETA didn’t give him enough opportunities to interfere with world politics. He had this obsession with, once they’d taken control of the world, he’d be able to legally mandate everyone to be vegetarian, take public transportation, et cetera. I’ve seen him gun down a roomful of civilians without so much as raising an eyebrow, but if someone told him something he was eating was made with meat by-products? He’d cry like a baby. I’ve seen him show more compassion for a stray cat on the road than I think he’d be capable of showing for another human. One of those people who’d get involved in politics after seeing that tweet about the dogs in Flint not having clean water. He thought of me as… not an animal, I probably would’ve gotten real food in that case, but… some kind of object. A car, maybe. He let me skip a wipe once, you know that? Not because he actually cared how much it hurt, but because he wanted to wait until the safehouse had gotten solar panels installed. And he wouldn’t fuck a car, if that makes sense. I wasn’t entirely human. I wasn’t human enough for him to hate.” He sighed, leaned back against the pillows. “I don’t think he’d know what to do with a kid except make sure it got enough servings of vegetables and stayed hydrated. I don’t think he would have abused Rikki, though. Murphy prided himself on having a few scraps of morality left. He’d pull them out of his back pocket whenever he needed to feel good about what Hydra was doing. ‘Oh, I can’t stand to hear the Asset cry like that, I’m going to go stand guard while you fuck with him,’ that sort of thing. Odds are he’d look the other way if anyone else wanted to hurt Rikki, but he wouldn’t go out of his way to hurt her just because. There are worse handlers for a kid to have.”

“And Oates?” Steve asked cautiously, not a hundred percent sure he really wanted to know the answer.

“Oates was a mercenary through and through. Like Deadpool, but Australian, female, much less of a sense of humor. She was getting paid to kill the enemies of Hydra, she wasn’t going to do anything she didn’t have to outside of work hours.  She tortured prisoners because she was following orders, but she wasn’t going to torture me because that wasn’t part of her job description. Again, could’ve been worse.”

A memory, and a question asked before he could stop himself: “Wasn’t Oates the one who thought it was funny to make you eat out of a bowl on the floor?”

Bucky gave a one-shouldered shrug. “Like I said, could’ve been worse. She even stopped people from fucking with me a couple times, if they hadn’t done the proper paperwork to requisition me or if I had a mission I needed to be functional for…” He trailed off abruptly and rubbed his eyes before looking at Steve, a quiet, vulnerable desolation in the edge of his smile. “Be honest with me, Stevie. How low are my standards?”

He went for the soft joke. Went for what he knew would smooth out the lines around the eyes of the man he cared for more than life. “Well, I think they could definitely be higher.”

“Gee, you think so?” Bucky quipped theatrically, widening his eyes. He seemed like he was about to start laughing, but he grew serious again. “Still. There were… a lot of people in Hydra, if  I knew they’d been around Rikki… Westfahl, for instance. Mercer.”

He remembered who Mercer was. Not because she’d reminded him of a woman who’d thrown herself at him back in the old days, but because she’d thought it would be funny to make the Winter Soldier eat sugar cubes from her hand like a Central Park carriage horse, and someone had taken a snapchat of it.

(He’d seen the snapchat, after. Put his fist through a wall.)

“You know what I’m saying?” Bucky continued. “People who got something out of torture besides just slavish devotion to the cause. People who would have reacted to the knowledge that they were in charge of a helpless kid not like it was a low-prestige desk job mission guarding experimental biotechnology, but like it was goddamn Christmas.” He slammed his fist into a pillow and had to take a few deep breaths before he could meet Steve’s eyes and continue once more. “Sure, she still ended up with handlers that would probably have been shit at raising a kid, probably have hated the gig, more or less, but they wouldn’t go out of their way to be cruel to her. Not more than they had to, or were told to… not much more, at least. My definition of lucky is probably pretty screwy, isn’t it.”

He looked exhausted, almost sheepish, and all Steve wanted to do was make him smile.

“Hey,” he said seriously, holding Bucky’s gaze. “You know what my definition of lucky is? You’re here, you’re alive, I get to talk to you whenever I feel like it. I get to be there for you and listen to you and just kinda bask in the fact that you trust me before we’ve even had our morning coffee, and you know what?” Gesturing to the kitchen, a grin spreading over his face: “We’ve got a robot making said aforementioned coffee. A robot. How cool is that?”

Bucky slung an arm around his shoulders, the metal still a little colder than room temperature from sleep and sweat. It was refreshing. Made him feel awake, alive. “You really are an old man, huh. Lucky you’ve got me to show you your way around a color TV.”

“That’s not all I’ve got you for,” Steve teased into his collarbones, just luxuriating in his scent, his presence. In the knowledge that no one was going to come barging in on them, and even if someone did, it wouldn’t matter because they were allowed to be in love.

“You absolute cornball,” Bucky said, yanking him into a hug and messing up his hair. “You enormous idiot. I love you so much, you know that? What did my punk ass ever do to deserve you?”

“A whole hell of a lot,” replied Steve, and he meant it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> dammit westfahl


	13. sometimes tornado, sometimes lullaby

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> you know who's important to me? natasha. thanks
> 
> mockingbird/bobbi is clint's superhero ex-wife from the comics, avengers member, and brilliant scientist 
> 
> "tales of suspense: hawkeye and the winter soldier" is a brilliant arc of the comics and if you like natasha you should read it. because you know who else likes natasha? hawkeye and the winter soldier.   
> and also me. 
> 
> fun fact: natasha being maybe princess anastasia is a Thing in canon. thank you chris claremont. 
> 
> marvel make sabra a refusenik (that's "conscientious objector" for you americans) 2k19

 

Natasha had spent a month in Israel, working to gather evidence on a government official who was secretly passing classified information on American spies to Dr. Doom in exchange for Latverian military technology. Sabra, the local superhero, had been in favor of bringing him in immediately; Natasha spent a month as a secretary and ended up with enough info to unmask everyone who’d worked with him. (That was why SHIELD hadn’t told Sabra she was there- flying and energy quills were some of the least stealthy powers.) Whenever Natasha was undercover there, people always assumed she was a citizen, some descendant of Soviet Jews who’d fled the old country a few generations back. She’d get questions like “Are both of your parents Jewish?” or “How long has your family been Israeli?” Her cover identity had answers to both of these questions: my mother’s Jewish, my father doesn’t know his heritage, they moved here from Russia when I was two years old- but out of character, she’d never know. Sure, she had some memories of a woman she thought was her mother, but were those real memories? Or were they implanted by the Red Room to give her some semblance of normalcy?

A long shower, and then a bath, she told herself as she stepped off the helipad, nodding to the pilot who’d transported her from Newark. It was colder back home than she’d gotten used to, and a normal human would have shivered in her light jacket. Still, she hurried to the elevator. _Call the catsitter and tell her I’ll be coming by to pick up Liho for a few days, get groceries delivered, figure out what I’m going to tell Sabra if she finds out I was operating in her territory…_ and find out if Clint’s going to be back from San Francisco anytime soon. Sure, they were off again this week, technically- she’d pissed him off by faking her death to figure out if the Red Room was trying to clone her again, he’d slept with a Mafia moll and been shot at by Russians, then decided to attempt going monogamous with his ex-wife again- but that meant nothing to their friendship. She still felt safest with him watching her back, his breathing slowing as she slept.

She met the eyes of her own exhausted reflection in the elevator’s gold-mirrored walls; winced, turned away. A quick text. _What time is it in California? Have you had a chance to go surfing yet?_

No response, not even left on read. Odds are he was too busy to look at his phone. Which, whatever, that was fine, she could be chill.

When she stepped off the elevator: Bucky Barnes, wearing a threadbare black hoodie and jeans, a slice of silver and shadow in the airy, modern corridor. The hood shadowed his hair, and a muscle ticked in his jaw as his metal fist clenched and unclenched. “Tasha,” he said. As if he’d been holding his breath. And, “Can I hug you?”

“Course.”

Instantly she was enveloped in his arms. His pulse felt dizzyingly rapid against her skin. She would have stroked his long hair, if he’d asked. “What is it?” she murmured. “You can tell me. Even if you’re mad at me for faking my death, too.”

“You… we…” He broke off then, burying his head in her neck, uneven breath hot.

A few moments ago she’d been thinking about how she needed a shower before the debrief, how she needed to make sure the apartment had cat food and green juice, make sure Jarvis didn’t order more than she could drink so she wouldn’t have to pour its filmy reek down the drain when it turned rancid. Now she knew she would stay here with her friend for as long as it took for him to be okay.

“Did you remember something? Do you want me to call Steve for you?” She kept her voice soft, the questions not overtly urgent. Steve was better at handling Bucky’s panic attacks; maybe because he’d known Steve before the head injuries and wipes, he always knew who Steve was, no matter how disoriented he became.

He pulled back then, shaking his head. “I think… I think this is something you should see for yourself.” His tone was neutral in a studied way. He could have been referring to anything.

“All right, then. Lead the way.”

 

Once, Rikki had been sent undercover into a children’s ballet studio. Not to kill one of the pupils, luckily- the advanced class would be playing snowflakes in a local theatre’s Nutcracker, and Hydra wanted to kill a sponsor of the theatre who’d been donating to the wrong political candidates and expressing the wrong socioeconomic views. Since the snowflakes were only in Act 2, and the chaperones were preoccupied with the little kids- the clowns and mice- Rikki was able to explore the theatre and gather information on the security system and guard rotations.

She’d gone to the ballet studio for three months to learn the choreography, two classes each week. Those had been the happiest hours of her life.

Rikki loved ballet almost as much as she loved animals. Almost as much as she loved food. The precision and discipline, the praise and gentle corrections she got from the teachers. Knowing that she was using her body to do something that wouldn’t hurt any civilians. To do something good. A few days ago, she’d found out that there were ballet classes and workouts she could pull up on her StarkPad- and since then, she hadn’t even looked at anything else during her allowed exercise periods.   

She breathed with the rhythm, engaging the muscles in her calves as she shifted her weight. Staying centered, staying balanced, even as she moved into a tendu. Side-and-closed-and-side-and-closed… one and two and three and four… Her head was full of numbers and movement, and that way it couldn’t be full of anything scary or bad.

 

 

What am I looking at, Natasha would have asked, even though part of her already knew. There was a balcony one floor up, enclosed by one-way mirrors, that overlooked the gym for when Coulson or Fury wanted to watch training without startling anyone; they stood together, leaning over the railing, forearms touching. And then Bucky said, “Look… look at the girl.”

It had to be a hologram, a memory pulled from her brain and made into light. A skinny girl with messy crimson curls and pale skin, moving fluidly through a ballet barre. Wearing light pink because no one had ever bothered to tell her redheads shouldn’t. The image below her was so like herself as a child, Natasha didn’t think it could be anyone else.

The girl shifted into a soutenu, then landed neatly in fifth position.

And Natasha- who had walked calmly on the ground of other planets and the pathways between dimensions, who could dodge through gunfire, who could block out any pain or emotion until a battle was done- gasped out loud.  

A stubborn chin, where hers had been delicate. Skin splattered with freckles where hers was like porcelain. And brown eyes… brown eyes just like Bucky’s.

Breathe, she told herself, and did. Only when she was sure she could speak calmly did she ask, “Who is that girl?”

“Her name is Rikki… Rikki Barnes,” he said, fidgeting with one of the strings on his hoodie. “A little over a decade ago, when I started going off the rails on a consistent basis, Hydra got into genetic engineering.”

“I see,” she replied, because it was all she could think of to say.

“Strange ran some tests from a blood sample. She’s got the X-gene, but 45 percent of her DNA is mine.”

“And the rest?” She already knew the answer. But she still had to ask.

The ghost of a smile on his full lips. “I guess they wanted to see if the Red Room’s serum and theirs bred true.”

Thoughts swirled through Natasha’s mind like cut-paper snowflakes during a staging of the Waltz of the Snowflakes as she hurried down from the balcony via a staircase and then around to the gym.

She and Clint had tried for a baby once. When they were young and wide-eyed, when Hank-and-Janet and Susan-and-Reed and Jean-and-Scott were all talking about getting married, when Natasha still assumed the world could have mercy for weapons like her. She’d figured everything was fine- after all, if not for the exquisite miracle of modern birth control, she’d still be getting her period. And the last time she’d gone in for medical treatment, with a wound in her abdomen that needed to be scanned for shrapnel that could damage her organs, SHIELD docs had said everything looked fine. In one of the versions of her memories- the one she liked best, honestly- she’d had a loving childhood, a nebulous passel of glamorous, clever older sisters who laughed with her and braided her hair and a little brother who beamed wide-eyed up at her when she read to him, and they ran together through the grand halls of an enormous house, and the idea of having a similarly large family appealed to her.

It wasn’t fine. Turned out their Red Room hadn’t wanted their best honeypot to run the risk of any inconvenient little accidents. Had wanted to make sure that becoming a mother could never interfere with her single-minded devotion to Mother Russia.

The technical term was induced ovarian failure. In layman’s terms, the lights were on, but nobody was home, egg-wise. Carrying someone else’s egg to term? That wasn’t an option, either. Later, she’d driven a stolen motorcycle to a Widow’s Web safehouse in Newark that no one on the team knew about and gotten very, very drunk.  

Of course being sterilized was hardly the most devastating or violent facet of her Red Room past. That honor had so many contenders- being forced to slaughter a classmate who’d failed as part of a twisted graduation ceremony, the missions where she was sent to assassinate or abduct children only a few years younger than her, the fact that they’d overwritten her memories without her consent, the fact that they’d had her killed and then transferred her memories- every messed-up version of them- to the body of a clone.  The fact that she didn’t have a normal response to pain anymore because she’d been trained to fight through agony. Because it had been push through or die.

It wasn’t a big deal.

Even as she’d flung an empty bottle against the wall, where it shattered with an off-kilter crash, she’d known she was probably overreacting. Plenty of people couldn’t have children. Plenty of people found out they couldn’t have children every day.

But on top of all the other violations she’d been forced to endure? The fact that she couldn’t bring a life into the world, one small soul to counterweight all those she’d taken from this earth?

There were people with bigger problems, and she knew this, and she told herself this every time it came up.

Except. On top of everything else, it fucking hurt.

And now to find out that Rikki existed… this little girl who looked so much like her, who carried so much of the same pain within her heart, who at thirteen was probably just as dangerous as any young Red Room trainee… this girl with her best friend’s stubborn chin and her own long limbs and wide mouth?

She wanted to kill the Hydra scientists who had created a girl just to shape her into a weapon. She wanted to thank them for bringing this inexplicably perfect child into the world.

When she was around the corner from the sliding glass doors, Natasha stopped walking. She pressed the heels of her palms into the orbital bone beneath her eyes. Breathed in for four counts, held for four, out for four, waited four counts before another breath. No one, not even the Jarvis subroutine that was monitoring the gymnasium, needed to see the Black Widow cry.

Inside the gym, classical music drifted through the air. I’m going to talk to her, Natasha thought. I’ll tell her everything... well, at least that I’m her mother, I suppose. But Rikki’s concentration was so absolute. She couldn’t stand to disturb it. Instead, she took off her shoes- her bare feet were soundless on the gym’s smooth floor- and moved towards the barre. Part of it, made with the same smarthouse Starktech as the rest of the tower, rose to meet her hand as she took her place by the mirror and behind Rikki.

 

He hadn’t known. Not before Strange came back to him with the results of the DNA test, and even then it had been a surprise.

But seeing them together, moving through the same sequences of steps side-by-side at the ballet barre, there was no doubt in his mind that Tasha was the other half of his little girl. That Rikki would grow up to look more like her than him.

Rikki’s mouth was a little too wide for her face, her eyes too big for someone so small. Her nose stuck out, and her ears seemed like they were trying to escape from her head in different directions. Natasha had grown into her features- on an adult, the same mismatched mouth looked expressive and sensual, her eyes full of emotion. Her stubborn nose gave a face that would otherwise have been too perfect personality.

As for the ears, well, that was probably a Barnes thing. But Rikki would grow into everything else, someday.

(And someone in Hydra had chosen to use the Black Widow’s DNA, not another metahuman’s or the DNA of a loyal operative. Someone had decided that their weapon needed to be beautiful. If he thought about that… about what it meant, what Hydra was like… it would infuriate him. But he breathed out, pushed the thought away- hoping Rikki had managed to retain more human rights than he had- and watched the people he loved dance.)   

 

Rikki had always known her DNA didn’t just come from the Winter Soldier. Her bright red hair, her freckles, the way her limbs always seemed too long for her body and her feet too big for her legs… she knew those didn’t come from him. Sometimes technicians had mentioned that she had the X-Gene, and drawn blood in an attempt to test what her powers would be. She knew that didn’t come from Winter.

“Do I have a mum or anything?” she’d asked. Oates had chuckled, ruffled her curls, and said, “Don’t be silly. You were grown in a laboratory, of course.” She didn’t mean to be cruel- just stating an obvious fact- but it had still stung a bit. Just one more way that she was different from real people, would always be different.

A few years later, she’d gotten up the courage to try it again. Sure, she hadn’t been grown in a uterus. But her hair and freckles? The X-Gene? Those… they had to come from somewhere! So she’d cornered Murphy on a dropship, widened her eyes in a just-a-kid-way when he flinched. “Mr. Handler? Have I got a mummy or another daddy or something anywhere?”

“You mean, genetically?” He’d laughed nervously, tried to sidle out from the corner she’d backed him into. She figured she’d get more information out of him if she let him. So she stood aside as he went to his locker, took a tofu-and-beans burrito out of his lunchbox.

“Yeah. I mean, I know I was grown in a laboratory, but… my DNA isn’t all the Winter Soldier’s, right? Because he’s not perfect, and I’m supposed to be an improvement on him, and since he doesn’t have red hair…” She trailed off, gazing up at him with innocent hope.

“Well…” Another big chomp of his burrito. It felt like it took an eternity to wait for him to finish chewing. “I wasn’t involved with the genetic engineering side of the project, but I remember hearing that you’re 55% Winter Soldier DNA, 45% someone else, and then 5% a third person. So odds are the second person might’ve been a woman with red hair… oh, shit, I wasn’t supposed to tell you that. I don’t remember why, but I wasn’t.” He took another bite. This time, he was so nervous that he swallowed some of the tinfoil wrapping by accident and spent a few seconds choking on it. “Don’t tell anyone I told you, okay? I’ll give you a half cup of blueberries when we get back from the mission, if you’d like.”

“Okay,” Rikki had sworn. But she’d already been thinking that there was someone out there who would maybe find out she existed someday, maybe care about her even though she wasn’t always a compliant asset and made lots of mistakes.   

What would this mysterious woman (she figured, statistically, her mysterious second parent was most likely to be a woman) look like? Would she have frizzy curls like Rikki’s, or straight hair with neat bangs, or maybe a fashionable short crop? Was she a Hydra agent? A soldier? A scientist? Was she even still alive?

In Rikki’s mind, she would be the most patient handler ever. She’d never use the taser or the punishment closet, and always give Rikki pain meds after she got wounded, even if it was her own fault and she’d done something stupid. Her eyes would be green like a tree or blue like the sky, things Rikki hardly ever got to see, and she’d have a soft voice and soft hands.

Rikki hadn’t thought about her egg donor since her allegiance was transferred to the Avengers. And now, with the Black Widow walking noiselessly towards her, all she could think about was wondering if she’d done something wrong.

With her auburn hair loose, wearing a plain T-shirt and matching sweatpants, the superspy looked like an ordinary woman. Rikki glanced over her shoulder, wondering what was going to happen now. Then the Black Widow rested delicate, long fingers on the barre- and began to dance with her. Her eyes were closed in a serene expression; she could follow the lesson from the teacher’s videotaped voice alone, didn’t even need to glance to check what a move or arm position meant. Rikki wanted to fall into the music just as deeply.

At last the exercise came to an end, and so did the piece of music. Rikki gestured at the holographic screen to pause the video. Then, she deliberately turned to face the older spy. To her shock, Natasha looked… flustered, even rattled. Her pale cheeks were flushed, and her eyes looked slightly red as well.

“Rikki,” she began, her low voice sounding inexplicably choked-up. “I’m your…” She took a slow, deep breath. “Dr. Strange’s DNA test said that 45% percent of your DNA is a copy of mine. And that means- Rikki, I’m your mother.”

On some level, Rikki had already known what she was going to say. Years of unformed wishes coalescing in just one instant, her daydreams of acceptance taking form. But she’d never dreamed that her mother would be someone so brave.

She didn’t even contemplate asking permission. Just flung herself forward, hugging the woman as hard as she could. Natasha smelled like hotel soap (white tea and verbena) and sports deodorant and dryer sheets. _And, somehow, a little bit like me._  She figured it was rude to touch someone besides her main handler when she hadn’t earned a big reward like getting a hug. Instead of letting go, though, her disobedient arms just squeezed tighter. She never wanted to let go. Never wanted to lose track of the mother she’d dreamed of for so long ever again.

Get it together, Rikki! Biting her lip, she forced herself to pull away- but before she could relinquish her grip, Natasha’s strong arms wrapped around her.

As much as Rikki hated crying, she couldn’t help it. Not against the onslaught of such overwhelming warmth and kindness. Her eyes stung, her stomach felt like it was flipping upside-down, and she burst into noisy tears.

“It’s all right, dushen’ka,” Natasha murmured, stroking her hair. Rikki’s Russian wasn’t quite as good as her Arabic or Spanish, and she wasn’t quite sure what the old-fashioned word meant, but she could still understand the meaning behind it. That she was cared for, and maybe she somehow even deserved to be treated this kindly.

She tucked a frizzy curl behind Rikki’s ear; Rikki felt, more than heard, her low chuckle. “You know, my ears looked just like yours when I was your age. The Red Room made me get plastic surgery- I never quite grew into them- but I think you will.”

Rikki’s own arms dropped to her sides. “You probably shouldn’t give me a hug. I tried to kill Mr. Steve Rogers Captain America and I hid under the doctor’s table… I don’t want you to be disappointed in me, but I’ve been very noncompliant. I shouldn’t be given rewards that I haven’t earned.”

“Yeah, well…” She tossed her hair. “First time I met Hawkeye, I tried to kill him. Let me tell you, hand-to-hand combat was never his proficiency. Backflipping away from a fight might work on a roustabout or street tough, but not on me. Would’ve broken his neck if one of his handlers hadn’t shot me… and when he insisted on dragging me into the safehouse and patching me up, I had no idea what to think- except that I wanted to become the sort of person he could trust. Hell, Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver- they’re in Europe doing some detective work for the X-Men, long story, you’ll meet them eventually- they were members of the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants before they decided to try out for the winning team. You’re not the first Avenger who got their start by going for a team member’s jugular, and you won’t be the last.” When a section of wall slid back, revealing Bucky jumping the last few steps of a spiral staircase, she grinned at him. “Ah, here he is, the other member of the Tried to Kill Captain America club. Think you’ll do ballet with us sometime? You’ve almost got enough hair to put up in a bun.”

A buzzing noise. She winced reflexively before realizing it was just Natasha’s smartwatch.

“Hello?” she said into it, and “Yes, I know. I’ll be down in a moment.” She pressed a button and turned back to Rikki and Bucky. “Debriefing. You know how it is. Maybe I’ll see you two later?”

Rikki went to put her hands in her pockets before remembering her leggings didn’t have any, clasping them behind her back instead. “We were going to maybe have a board game night.”

“Does she know how to play poker?”

Normally she hated when adults talked over her head like she wasn’t there. But this time she felt like they were conspiring for her benefit, planning a wonderful surprise.

He grinned. “Not yet. But I think she’ll learn pretty fast.”

Natasha’s eyes were a cool blue lake in summer when she looked down. “I want you to know that I’m so glad to meet you, Rikki. I’m so glad to have you in my life.”

The fact that people could say such words to someone as broken as her, and mean it? She would never get over the strangeness of that.


	14. applaud the ghost surviving herself

“Hey there, Rikki,” Bucky said after breakfast. “Got some big news for you today.”  
“I’m on the Avengers. And we’re going to go fight robots and maybe Galactus,” she guessed, bouncing on her toes.  
“No, but it’s still something fun.”  
“The Young Avengers? Do I get to train with them?”  
  
“We’re going on a field trip,” Steve said. Wearing a baseball cap, sunglasses, and an oversized sweatshirt, he looked almost like just an ordinary person. He even had a fake beard on. Rikki figured the average New Yorker never even saw Cap out of uniform, but the beard was a perfect finishing touch. “We’ve got you a birth certificate and ID and everything, so it’s safe for you to be out of the tower, even in case people take pictures of you and try to find out who you are.”

“Where are we going?” She was so excited, she wanted to scream.  
  
“Grand Central. One of the most beautiful places in all of Manhattan,” Steve replied, sounding just as proud as if he’d built it himself.  
  
The street right outside Stark Tower was very busy. Cars tried to edge into one lane or another. Commuters and tourists swarmed across the street, even when the light wasn’t green, and there was a pavilion across the street where people were lunching or chatting or just checking their phones.  
The cab smelled like smoke; Rikki got in last and stuck her head all the way out, her arms folded on the windowsill.  
A woman in heels, walking a tiny white dog that seemed made entirely of fluff; a bunch of kids Rikki’s age on a school trip, wearing school jumpers and taking selfies and chattering to each other in French. The buildings were made of mirrors and the stores were impossibly specific; greeting cards, smoothies, clothes that diplomats probably wore to get assassinated in. The cab stopped a block away from Grand Central. They walked the rest of the way and headed in through the food court, then into an expansive space that made Rikki’s jaw drop.  
  
The turquoise ceiling was enormous; Rikki could throw a grenade up with all her might and not even scrape it. Painted animals seemed to dance across the artificial sky, and gold archways glowed as people rushed in and out. The smooth floor under her feet made her want to dance, too; still staring up, she spread her arms and twirled until the bright bright blue blurred.  
“Prettiest room in New York, ain’t it. And you don’t even have to spend a penny to get in,” Bucky told her, soft fondness in his voice, and “Y’know, you come here late enough at night, the pigeons take over this whole place... just winging back and forth from the windows and the arrivals board, swooping onto the balconies and perching on the railings.”  
She wanted to borrow one of Falcon’s wingsuits or stick her face in a bucket of Pym Particles, figure out a way to touch this swooping sky someone had brought inside with color alone.  
  
“If you think that’s neat? Wait till you see where we’re going next,” Steve told her.   
They went through an archway and up a ramp to a store called Kidding Around; the huge windows in front held a diorama of faeries suspended on fishing wire, bunnies reading picture books to dolls. Inside, she could see shelves of gleaming plastic boxes and racks that probably spun when you pushed them.  
“This is one of the best toy stores in Manhattan- and a lot less crowded than FAO Schwartz.”

Rikki nodded, trying not to stare, trying to look like she went into stores like this every day. Knowing about different types of toys was probably an important part of learning how to blend in with civilians; it seemed like every thirteen-year-old had bought things to play with at some point in time.   
  
“Stevie. Stevie, look it,” Bucky stage-whispered as they walked in, tugging on Steve’s hoodie. There was a whole shelf of old-fashioned toys in reproduction vintage packaging- jacks and yo-yos and tins of marbles, silver Slinky’s, and- what Bucky was looking at- harmonicas and kazoos.  
“God, remember the absolute racket we used to make? I never figured out how someone with asthma could make a noise that high and that   
loud for that long.”  
Bucky snorted. “We’d pretend we were a two-piece brass band. March around the apartment wearing hats made out of newspaper... do you remember that neighbor in the upstairs tenement? Face like a bad plum.”  
Steve, rolling his eyes: “Oh, god. Do I ever! She used to chase us out with a broom and threaten to call the NYPD on us if we didn’t-“  
“Pipe down and stop making that racket!” They mimicked in chorus, and Bucky laughed so hard he had to hold onto Steve for support, his shoulders shaking in silent mirth. Serious once more, he followed up with a request: “Right, so: we are getting the harmonicas, right?”   
“Absolutely. And kazoos.”  
“Think Jarvis will chase us out with a broom?”  
“Well... he can try!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i just really love grand central station ok


	15. small as my own freckles

Rikki turned in place slowly, not even sure where to look first. Glossy boxes of building kits, muscled action-movie characters in clamshell packaging, dolls and books. “Have I maybe earned getting anything as a reward?” she dared to ask at last.   
“Rikki. Civilian kids have toys, right? So: you can get anything you want. It’s equipment. Think of it as equipping yourself from a mission...”  
“Uh-huh,” Rikki chirped, not even bothering to hear the rest of the sentence, and sprinted to the shelf of glittery putty in shiny tins.  
Pure Emerald and Sparkling Ruby, because she liked things that caught the light, and then onto the building toys and action figures- “Look look! That’s you!” Rikki couldn’t help but squeal, pointing to a Cap toy which came with something described as Real Shield-Throwing Action.  
“Shh. We’re undercover,” he cautioned, but smiled back anyway.   
“I don’t like the beard,” she said out of the side of her mouth. “It’s a good disguise, but it makes you look old and sad.”  
“See? She agrees with me,” Bucky said, and handed her a basket as a reward.  
“This looks tactical,” Rikki said, hoisting a three-in-one helicopter, speedboat, and sports car building kit into her basket. Hundreds of pieces! She and her dads could maybe build it on the carpet in front of the TV while Star Trek was on.  
There was the rack of little plastic animals, everything from cows to dinosaurs, in neat rows with color-coded tags. Rikki got the one that looked like a K-9 puppy- and then a smaller dog with a squishy face, so he wouldn’t be lonely.  
There was a whole wall of craft kits- the ones with faeries and mermaids and flower crowns all looked too girly-girl or too babyish, but the one where you could make bracelets with tight knots in colorful thread, and the one where you made necklaces called “eye of the gods” by wrapping string precisely around crossed sticks, looked like the best kind of downtime activity.  
“What about something you can do with Tasha?”  
“The craft kits, right?”  
“Sure.”  
And then she wandered over to the spinny rack of books near the cash register and saw the dress-up sticker dolls.  
Perfect! It was more tactical than a regular doll, which you couldn’t fold in half and fit into a backpack. And it was something she could accomplish, putting all the stickers in the exactly-right place.  
Sticker Doll Dress-Up, Ballerinas, went into her basket. Maybe Tasha could tell her more about the stories behind the ornate, colorful costumes and sparkling sets.  
Steve beamed at the book. “Oh, that’s a great choice. Tasha will love that- you’re so thoughtful!”  
It was praise she hadn’t really earned, but she could still bask in it- and then she noticed the entire alcove, on the wall by the door, of just stuffed animals.   
“Hold this,” she said, pushing her basket into Bucky’s hands, and darted over to the shelves.  
There were so many animals she didn’t know where to start.  
Whales with horns, fish with puffy glitter lips, candy-colored bunnies with floppy ears, every color of cat. She couldn’t help picking up different ones to touch their fur, even when she had no intention of bringing them home- she wasn’t a “swan with a little crown” sort of girl, but the fabric felt so smooth and glossy.  
“Oh,” Rikki whispered.  
There was a whole shelf of little stuffie octopi, Starburst pink and smoothie orange and bath towel blue. It was the sort of thing the people at Hydra kept on their desks. There was a whole trend of owning cutesy octopus or squid things. A way to say you were with Hydra, that you knew something no one else did, that your ordinary coworkers would see as just a cute paperweight or pin or figurine.  
Their stitched, smiling faces seemed to be watching her. She scowled at them, then crouched down and started turning them around so they couldn’t smile at her. One of them she decided to pick up and fling on the floor as hard as she could, stuffing pellets hitting wood, and kick it around- no, give the other stuffed animals a chance. She made a fluffy bear kick the nasty octopus with his little foot.  
“See how you like it- see how you like being told you can never do anything right and you fucked up the whole mission but you’re just imagining that everyone’s mad at you because if they said it never happened then it didn’t-“  
Still muttering to herself, she only half-heard the cashier talking to Bucky.  
“-her caretaker? You must be so exhausted from looking after a special needs child, I know it can be such a burden on a family. If you’re looking for a good ABA therapist-“

His hand went flat on the glass countertop, gloved but still distractingly loud.   
“She is my daughter,” Bucky practically growled. “She is not a burden, and there is nothing wrong with her.”

 And then, the next thing she knew, Bucky was beside her, a hand on her elbow. “So we’ll pay for that teddy bear, and then let’s get something to eat, yeah?”  
Rikki held up the little pink octopus. “I want this, too.”  
“Really? Well, if you’re sure,” he said with a rueful smile. She knew he’d seen the technicians with little plush octopus keychains on their purses, too. “Any plans for it besides just using it as a punching bag?”  
“You’ll see,” Rikki said, and smiled, hugging her new bear friend close to her chest.  
Steve met them right as they left the toy store, carrying two bags each.  
“I got this for you- because you liked the ceiling so much.”  
Rikki pulled the paper bag from his hands and peered inside. “Wow! Is this food?”  
“Yep. Got the last one.”  
The doughnut was small enough to fit in the palm of her hand, but that wasn’t what made it special. With swirled blue-and-turquoise frosting, and star-shaped golden sprinkles, it looked just like the fancy ceiling.  
“That’s food,” she repeated, dumbfounded. Sure, she’d eaten food that looked nice before- but something this pretty probably had no long-term nutritional value!  
“Yep. And it tastes even better than it looks.”  
Her knees nearly buckled right there in the passageway outside Kidding Around. It was so soft in her mouth, vanilla and sugar and cinnamon and melting icing. She chewed every bite for as long as she could, held the last one up to her nose and just breathed before eating it.  
“Wow,” she managed when she’d finished at last, and “Is my tongue blue?”  
“Yep,” Bucky replied, grinning.  
Realizing she’d been inefficient, she ducked her head in apology. “Sorry for standing here and making you watch me eat, I know we have somewhere else to be-“  
“Hey, it’s fine,” Steve told her, putting a hand out for her to take. After a second of inner debate, she did. His rough palm felt like a handwarmer in winter, glowing with heat. “You should’ve been there the first time Buck ate chocolate.”  
He nodded as they started walking, heading to another mysterious destination that Rikki knew she would love. “Yup. Cried for an hour and a half.”  
  
There was construction going on by the entrance to the market, so they had to slip single-file through a featureless miniature corridor; but then it opened onto big glass doors that Rikki was excited to duck through. The first thing she noticed was the tomatoes. Scarlet like Thor’s cape, deep red like Vision’s face, bold yellow like paint on an Iron Man suit, Hulk-skin green, all overflowing from their baskets. Apples that smelled like rooftop roses and sunlight: Pink Lady, Gala, apples bigger than both her fists such a deep red they seemed purple, little green ones that smelled rust-ruddy and tart. An entire table of nut containers stacked like the centerpiece cake at a Hydra party- a wall of cut fruit, backlit and gleaming. Across from that, smelly pale fish gleaming silver on ice chips; she wanted to touch it and see if it wiggled, but the stinky smell drove her further on.  
“Blueberries,” she said, pointing to an array of pints. By some alchemy of money they came into her fathers’ possession- but by then, she’d already drifted on.  
Baskets of cheese that cost twenty dollars for just a meal’s worth: like caramel popcorn and peanut brittle, when she stuck her head in to take a sniff.  
While she was examining more cheeses through glass, the colors ranging from milk-white to sunset orange, Bucky came up behind her. He pressed something into her hand- a little piece of cheese in plastic wrap, tiny grapes that seemed carved from jade.  
“Try them together- it’s amazing.”  
The cheese was the perfect texture, not too mushy or too chewy; the grapes were like if caviar had the sweetness of candy. “Yum,” was all she could say.  
Steve nodded. “Grand Central. One of the most overpriced places in Midtown- even by this century’s standards- but sometimes? It’s worth it.”  
There was a meat counter that reminded Rikki of interrogations and intestines; it probably tasted better than it looked, but she didn’t want to bother finding out. Once someone had swallowed a valuable flash drive, and they couldn’t wait for Hydra’s scientists to uncover it with an autopsy- so it was up to an agent with a metal detector, and Rikki and her little knife-  
“Hey,” Bucky said. Someone bumped into her; she stumbled against him, startled back to the present.  
“You’ve got to see this.”  
A whole counter with rows of bowls on gleaming wood, ground-up spices and dried herbs. Rikki pressed her face against the plexiglass barrier, trying to smell everything at once: curry that tickled her nose, something bright and green and zingy, something that made her cheeks heat and her mouth water. Zaatar and herbes de Provence and saffron, things she’d never even heard of. And then, on the other side of the counter, tea- the air gleaming with sweet scents, bowls overflowing with cubed sugar-crusted fruit peel and perfect little dried flowers. The person behind the counter held out samples on a long wooden spoon for her to close her eyes and sniff. Jasmine didn’t smell as good as it looked, and neither did the mint chocolate, but she ended up getting little bags of pomegranate rooibos and tropical fruit hibiscus and lavender rose.  
“Good choice,” Bucky said with a grin, the same way he said “Good shot,” when they were training, and it made Rikki feel just as proud.   
The counter with hand-dipped chocolates and carefully sculpted marzipan behind glass didn’t look like enough bites for the amount you paid, but Rikki figured there would be desert at home. She sampled the rich dark seed-crusted bread at the bakery counter and ate a roll dusted with salt crystals and little bits of fried chive, like a minefield of flavor in the best possible way.

There was a mini-gift shop with an entire wall of socks. Steve found a shot glass shaped like the Statue of Liberty and wouldn’t stop chortling over it.

“So? We can’t even get drunk. Wha’ddyou want with a shot glass?”

“It’s the Statue of Liberty’s tiny head- and look, they’ve got I Love New York placemats!” He looked younger when he smiled, less like a man out of time.

Bucky scoffed and shoulder-checked him. “You want knickknacks, you dust them. Socks, on the other hand? Practical. Tactical. Keep your toes warm. No such thing as too many socks.” And to prove it, he picked out a pair of black socks with red toes and cuffs, decorated with hamburgers, for himself, and goldenrod socks with pancake stacks and little hearts for Rikki.  


Right by the exit that led back to the subway, there was another arrangement of fresh fruits and vegetables, an entire wall of green things kept cool by refrigeration and constant mist. Rikki wanted to stick her face up to the plants and rub her hands on all of them- did the shiny long one feel smooth? Were those feathery leaves as soft as they looked? – but the flowers were too much of a distraction. As well as a sneaky section of individual flowers tucked behind a counter- all colors of roses, giant gerbera daisies in tubes to keep the heads from drooping on their stems, ruffly carnations- there were bouquets wrapped in brown paper. “Can we buy the whole flower section?” Rikki asked, coming up for air from a bunch of lilacs. She was only mostly kidding.

“How about… two bouquets?”

“So… one of these in the kitchen and one in the family room, maybe?”

She shook her head. “The lilacs are for us, but the white ones are for ‘Tasha.”

Technically her mission parameters were to protect the Winter Soldier. Not to cheer him up. Being cheery wasn’t even supposed to be mission-relevant. But when he beamed down at her, she could’ve sworn she felt that little ping of dopamine from hitting an objective just right.

“That’s a great idea, Rikki. I think she’s going to love that.”

“Why? Flowers die, don’t they? Won’t she think it’s frivolous?” she asked worriedly as Steve had the flowers wrapped and paid for them.

“It’s frivolous… it’s something she’d never buy for herself, she’s never even in the States for long enough to keep a plant alive. That’s why she’ll appreciate it.”

Rikki wasn’t sure she understood, but she nodded anyway.

After they were finished shopping, they went into Lexington Passage, and Rikki ran towards the store with goldenrod walls that matched her new socks. She put on every hand cream at L’occitane and almost every perfume- bouncy green lemon verbena, soft peony, roll-around-in-it rose, the bright lime shea butter that she rubbed in all the way up to her elbow crinkles, and then- because the combination was making her head start to swirl- washed her arms in a big porcelain sink with golden faucets until her skin just smelled like skin again.

  
(But she got lemon verbena soaps wrapped in pretty paper for herself and Tasha, so that they could both chase the traces of mission-smoke and antiseptic and debriefing room out of their hair.)

Between shops, people seemed to unconsciously steer around Captain America and the Winter Soldier, even when they were dressed like completely ordinary people.

“So I’ve been thinking- Rikki, you were really good today. You didn’t go into combat mode on any civilians, not even when that woman bumped into you.”

Rikki hadn’t even realized that was a big deal at the time. She’d just assumed that her superior officer would be capable of assessing the threat, telling her if there was one. “Do I get a reward?” She couldn’t imagine, after a day like today- full of things that were usually only post-mission rewards for exemplary performance- what she could possibly be given.

“How would you like to try taking the subway?” Steve asked her.

Rikki’s eyes went very wide. “I have never been on the subway in my whole entire life.” The subway, as far as she knew, was a cheap but inefficient way to get from place to place. It was confined and public, making it a bad place to kill someone. There had never been any point for her to experience it. She got to ride the escalator and- after being told that she was supposed to turn the bars, not just parkour over them- went back to swipe her own MetroCard for the very first time.

Rikki held up the stuffed octopus, planning to chuck it onto the tracks just before the train came. She’d visualize fear in its embroidered eyes, giggle as the wheels tore it apart into shreds of fabric and stuffing.

Then a baby’s cry cut through the air behind her. Instinctively, Rikki propelled herself towards the sound- was it a civilian, was there shooting, who needed to be evacuated- but it was nothing. Just a really little kid crying, the way kids cried for no reason lots of times.

The woman holding the kid’s stroller was on her cellphone. Chipped bubblegum-pink polish on her nails, dark brown roots showing under blonde dye; she looked tired. “I know, I’m so sorry, I’ll get the money to you as soon as I can…” She covered the phone with her hand for a second, mouthed SORRY to Rikki before resuming the conversation. “I’ll take an extra shift if I have to. Whatever it takes to get my family through this.” And, “I know I didn’t give birth to her, we’re not related, but that doesn’t matter, Kevin. She’s still my daughter.”

Rikki stuck out her tongue at this Kevin person.

“Bleh,” the toddler said, mimicking her.

Gazing down at the little girl in her stroller, unconsciously clutching the toy octopus to her chest, Rikki wondered if she had ever been that small, that helpless. Had she ever had a round face and gaped in surprise when someone stuck out their tongue?

“Stuffie,” the toddler girl said, reaching out her little chubby hands.

Rikki looked down at the octopus, puzzled. “You want this? Really?”

“Stuffie!” It seemed like she was going to cry again. Her tiny fingers made grasping motions.

This kid, Rikki realized, didn’t know what Hydra was. Didn’t know that an octopus could stand for kids like her being dragged out of their parents’ arms. And maybe she’d never would. Maybe she’d grow up in a world where Hydra could never threaten the people she loved.

“Yeah, sure,” Rikki said, only a little reluctantly. “You can have it.”

She tossed it into the stroller, an easy underhand throw; the little girl wrapped her arms around it and squeaked in joy.

“I’m so sorry my child stole your-“ That was the stressed-out mom, covering her phone again.

“It’s okay. I think she likes it more than I did, anyway.”

Rikki ran back to her dads just as the subway was pulling up.

“What happened to the octopus?” Bucky asked her. Before she could answer: “We’re supposed to wait for people to get off the subway before we get on, by the way.”

Her dads sat, but Rikki balanced in the middle of the car, lowering her center of gravity so that she could sway with the train’s movement as it started and not be knocked down. “I was going to throw it in front of the train, but…” She shrugged. “There was a kid who needed a smile more than I did.”

The way they looked at her when she said that made her think that maybe she really could be an Avenger someday, or at least a human being.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> did i mention i love grand central station a THREE THOUSAND


	16. raised without sunlight, born for slaughter

It was almost a month since Rikki had arrived at Avengers Tower, and she was doing great. She had an actual child therapist, a woman named Rebecca Kaplan whose own child was a metahuman as well. She’d started skyping in to Xavier’s for a daily math class (it was the only subject at which she was at grade level) and had even made a friend, a girl named Whitney whose skin produced poisonous chemicals. They texted each other all the time.

Rikki also had a babysitter. His name was Peter Parker. Yeah, Stark’s intern Parker. At first, Bucky had felt pretty skeptical.

“So let me get this straight,” Bucky had said, raising an eyebrow. “You want your intern, a kid from Queens who’s maybe a hundred and fifteen pounds soaking wet, to babysit my daughter, who could take out a Navy Seal with one hand tied behind her back.”  
“Oh, yup,” Stark had said, waving a hand casually and not even looking at him. “They’re both smart kids, it’ll be great. Get along like a house on fire.”  
  
Bucky had gunned his way through that day’s mission- some motherfucker on Wall Street trying to hold the families of rival stockbrokers hostage via mercenary army- constantly expecting his phone to go off. What if Rikki had a panic attack and started choking the intern out? That would be... what were they up to... Civil War 4, probably. He really didn’t want to be the man who had to start an all-out superhero brawl protecting his daughter from Tony Stark. (That being said? At least on this issue, he could totally understand Stark’s point of view. He’d chuck anyone who hurt Rikki through an avengers tower window- or, as the kids were saying these days, yeet.)  
  
But Rikki had greeted him and Steve at the door that night with a smile on her face and a backwards baseball cap. “I have a new friend! His name is Peter Parker and he’s really good at rock climbing. We went to the library and we went to the bodega and I got a comic book and a bag of cookies- she ducked into the kitchen, sprinted back with a plastic shopping bag, and held up an empty cookie wrapper proudly. And that was fun. And he showed me Clean Vines on his starkphone. I don’t know what clean vines are, but they’re my new favorite. So that was, you know, pretty awesome.”  
Before either of them could say anything, she’d launched right back into talking.  
“And then he took me into the lab and I learned about lab safety. When you’re not the one being experimented on, it’s really different! I got to wear a lab coat and gloves and goggles and I had to put my hair back. He says next time he babysits, we’re gonna build robots. Anyway, I really like him, and if you try to foist me off on any other babysitters, I’ll probably scream. So, how was work?”  
“Pretty wild. Lots of hostages... we were lucky to get them all out alive.”  
As Steve sat down at the dinner table with her, Bucky’s phone buzzed.  
It was Stark. One sentence:  
Told you so.  
Bucky muted his phone.  


  
“Ready for debriefing, Winter Soldier,” Rikki said with a crisp salute as she ran into the apartment and plopped down on an armchair after a long, exciting day. She and Peter had been training together in the tower gym. (The first day he babysat her, she’d pretended to drown in the pool, just to see what he’d do- and he’d leapt off the rock-climbing wall, swung across the gym, and landed in the pool. After scolding her for scaring him, he’d made her promise not to tell. Since then, they’d been planning for when they’d eventually go on patrols and fight bad guys together.)  
“At ease, asset,” Bucky replied with a nod. “So apparently you’re doing a fantastic job adjusting to civilian life.”  
She nodded, eager to report on her day. “Miss Pepper and Darcy took me to Washington Square Park by way of the playground on Third. There were little kids from a daycare, an’ one of them fell down and started screaming...” She started chewing on a fingernail, evidently figuring out how to finish the sentence.  
“If you made a mistake and classified a civilian as a priority target, I’m not angry with you, sweetheart. It takes time to re-adjust mission parameters.”  
Rikki wiggled in her chair, kicking her legs as a grin burst over her face. “But I didn’t! I put my hands over my ears and did my deep breathing exercises just like Mr. Falcon Sam Wilson said so. An’ then I asked if we could go to the Washington Square and hear the street musicians and Miss Pepper brought me a coca-cola and a soft pretzel.”  
His face lit up in a grin. “You’ve got a great memory. I’m so proud of you.”  
Strange how him just saying things could feel like a reward, as sweet as a pint of blueberries, warm as a blanket that she didn’t have to give back. “Yessir thank you sir!”  
“What’d you think?”  
“The pretzel was good. It had calories and it was salty. But... the Coke went up my nose and made my tongue feel buzzy. Here is some data, I do not want to have any kind of soda as a reward.”  
“You’re just like me, kiddo, you know that? Stevie always used to rag on me something awful, I couldn’t drink pop unless it had gone flat. Still rather have water.”

Rikki beamed. Like me, she thought. Like they had something in common, not just perfect sniper-steady hands and the ability to slow their own metabolisms through deep concentration. That was like running under sunlight, or the time she’d told Darcy I don’t want you to braid my hair and Darcy had said okay, that’s totally fine.  
  
Bucky leaned forward, steepling his fingers. “So: you’re out of therapy for the day, so am I, want to do something fun?”  
“Like what?”  
“Roof garden volleyball. Baking brownies. We could watch Star Wars again, if you want?”  
Rikki had watched Star Wars ten times, three with Bucky. She was getting to the point where she could recite the whole thing out loud, where she could be entirely sure that the good guys could win.  
“Can I suggest something that’s not on the list?”  
“Always.”  
‘Scrima sticks, or maybe bouldering? And then brownies. And then Return of the Jedi?” They’d learned the weapon from Natasha, who’d picked it up from an old friend in Hell’s Kitchen, who’d apparently learned it from ninjas, an intriguing detail that she’d vaguely dropped. Rikki liked it because it was pretty non-lethal. She felt safe walking around with them, especially since she didn’t have to worry about taking out any civilian targets.  
“Sounds good. You get on some play clothes, I’ll grab sneakers, and... meet you in the Stark Enterprises gym at 0400 hours?”  
“Yes, sir,” Rikki said eagerly, saluting as she bounced out of her chair.  
Just then, a phone rang. Not her ringtone.  
“Stark? What’s up?” He put it on speaker, which she appreciated- it wasn’t about her, didn’t mean she’d done something wrong.  
“That Hydra scientist we’ve been looking for on your intel? We’ve tracked him to a base in Brazil.”  
“Which scientist?”  
“Mike Mosley, the one working on neuroeugenics.”  
He seemed to think for a second or two before arriving at some sort of decision. “Rogers coming?”  
“Course.”  
“Then so am I. You don’t even need to ask. Meet you at the Quinjet as soon as I can.”  
A mission, a real mission- the chance to support her superior officer in the field, not just work on civilian objectives and deep cover cultural assimilation ops. Rogers would see how valuable he was, and then he’d never even THINK about decommissioning her. She flapped her hands excitedly as he hung up the call. “Sir. How many days of equipment should I pack? What climate are we dressing for- I know bulletproof vest is regulation, but what else? Boots or sneakers? How far is our drop point from the mission? Do you want me to snipe and be stealthy, or should I bring a grenade launcher? How many small arms?”

When he turned to look at her, his expression was serious. “Rikki, I’m sorry I wasn’t clear about this earlier, but you’re not coming. The Young Avengers have expressed interest in adding you as a junior member, Spider-Man may need you to run scouting or interference, but a Hydra-infested battlefield is no place for a child.”

I’ve been on the battlefield since I was eight years old, she wanted to say. Forbidding me from doing what I love, what I was made for, won’t change a thing about who I am! It won’t undo my conditioning or make me a civilian. I am lethal, and you will never be able to change that. Never ever. Instead she burst out, “But Squirrel Girl was younger than me when she started! And Honey Badger- Wolverine’s little sister who you said I should have a playdate with the next time she’s on the East Coast- she’s been helping the Young Avengers and she’s only ten!”

He crouched down so that he was just below her eye level: see, I’m not a threat. It felt like a conscious attempt to placate her. “Squirrel Girl’s parents didn’t know about what she was doing, and they would have told her to wait until she was older if they’d known. It’s true that Gabby is thirteen, but she also regenerates as rapidly as Deadpool does, and she’s incapable of feeling pain. You, on the other hand… if you get a leg blown off, that’s going to stay blown off.”

“But it’s not fair!” She wanted to grab every dish from the cabinet and smash them on the floor, but settled for knocking a wooden kitchen table chair down, satisfied at the slam. “I’m just as good a fighter as you are, I’m better than Captain America, you said so yourself. The fact that I’m fourteen years old shouldn’t matter. Hydra made something to help you and watch your back. And you know what? They got it right!”

“Rikki,” he said, a hand on her arm, and if it had been anyone else she would have flinched away. Instead she just scowled.

“I know Hydra wanted you to be a weapon,” he continued, “but you know what I see when I look at you? An amazing little girl who’s going to have an incredible life ahead of her. A normal life. And if you want to join the Young Avengers or the Great Lakes Avengers when you’re older and have a few more years of training under your belt, or even join Daredevil’s team on the West Coast, then that’s going to be your decision. But right now, you already have a mission. Your mission is being a kid and enjoying life. And I am not going to jeopardize the success of that mission by bringing you along to Hydra’s jungle base.”

She didn’t reply, shrugged off his touch.

He sighed. “Okay, Rikki. I know you’re angry at me right now, but this would be a great opportunity for you to draw a picture about it, or write in your journal, or maybe do some yoga. What do you think?”

“I’m going to take a nap,” she said, storming past him. “Because apparently, I’m just a little kid- apparently I’m not grown up enough to know what I want!” She slammed the door and threw herself on her bed, refusing to cry; she had endured more pain than this.

His muffled voice from outside the door: “Rikki, I just want you to know I’m proud of you for feeling empowered to express your feelings. Tell you what, when I get back, I’ll have Tony reach out to Professor Xavier about maybe letting you train with some kids your age, okay? I’m sure the Generation X reserve team would be very pleased to have you there, or maybe you could even be on a squadron with that friend of yours.”

“Whatever,” Rikki muttered, tugging a pillow over her head.

“Okay,” he said, and “I’ll see you when I get back, yeah?”

She didn’t move. After a while, she heard his footsteps walking away. Rikki waited until she couldn’t hear him anymore. She counted to twenty under her breath- then dashed to her closet. After scanning it for bugs and explosives, the Avengers had let her keep her former tactical gear; she’d spray-painted her reinforced jacket blue, added an Avengers-red stripe to the sleeves and back with duct-tape, and hand-embroidered an A logo patch for the front, securely attaching it over where the Hydra octopus had been. Her tactical pants with tons of pockets were small versions of standard-issue gear, and so was her plain camo backpack. She’d dyed both blue and added a little Avengers zipper pull to the biggest pouch.

Red thermal shirt, matching red bandanna tied over her mouth, prototype StarkTech night-vision goggles that she’d borrowed to play hide-and-go-seek with Spiderman and “forgot” to return, and the brand of sneakers usually worn by superpowered speedsters. “Okay,” she said to her reflection, putting on her backpack. “Let’s make sure this works…” She pressed the zipper pull, and the costume flickered to spy-stealth black. Another press, and bright colors swept across the smart fabric. She’d coaxed Spider-Man into showing her how his suit worked, then into helping her design a “theoretical prototype” of her own- he didn’t know she was planning on 3D-printing it right away!

Someone with more fashion sense than common sense had designed this costume for her father during the War, or a similar version. She’d been looking through an old history book when she’d spotted it, and he’d glanced over her shoulder and laughed.

“I was like- are you kidding me? I’m a sniper, not an icon. I’ll wear it for press releases and film reels, but you can’t pay me enough to wear it in the field,” he’d said with a laugh. “The Stars and Stripes may have been all well and good for Cap, but there are some things you can’t do when you’re wearing the American Flag.”

Rikki knew what he meant. There were some things that could only be done from the shadows… and some people who were more suited for the shadows than others. Even if she had to come along in secret, she’d do whatever it took to keep her family safe.

 


	17. rawblade glasstooth girl

During the war, someone had come to Bucky with an offer: listen, we need something to get kids interested in the war effort, can we age you down four or so years in the comics? He’d been talked into the idea, mainly by the spiffy paycheck that came with. They’d given his fictional counterpart the costume he was too practical to wear- and a black domino mask.

Rikki’s was hidden in a shoebox in a plastic bag in a paper bag, and she held her breath as she pulled it out. The nanotechnology that would keep it securely attached to her face- which she’d convinced Peter to help with- felt faintly warm and the tiniest bit sticky against her fingertips; she closed her eyes, placing it on carefully before contorting her face to make sure it would stay. Only when she was sure that it would work did she look at her reflection once more.

 _I look like them,_ she thought. _Like 'Tasha and Bucky._ Her chest felt tight in a way she couldn’t explain.  

There was one more thing to figure out, though. What was she supposed to call herself? She couldn’t wear the red and blue and stay Snakebite. That was a name Hydra had given her, and she had never wanted it.

There was something else tucked away at the bottom of her closet: the Captain America comics collection she’d gotten when Peter had taken her to the library.  
She flipped through the pages at random, hoping she’d see something that might provide her with inspiration.  
The Bucky Barnes of the comics had been a convenient fiction, a child-friendly figure to obscure the brutality of a trained soldier whose strength of will had allowed him to live through unspeakable horrors.  
_But there are real kids out there today who need someone like them to look up to... kids who don’t know that they’re allowed to scream for help if a grownup or older kid is hurting them, or who don’t even know that the way they’re being treated is wrong! And seeing me on TV? That’s gonna mean something to them... I just know it._  
Then her gaze fell on a full-page spread. It was one of those old-time ads that told kids to send away 10 cents for something.  
“Every red-blooded American kid should join Captain America’s Sentinels of Liberty & help fight spies & traitors to the USA!”  
Rikki didn’t have the biggest vocabulary, but she knew a sentinel was someone who stood guard over or protected something... someone who shielded what they believed in. It was a name with a history, even though- as a quick search through her tablet’s encyclopedia told her- no hero or metahuman had used it before.  
Even though it started with the same letter as Snakebite, even though the hidden mark of credit she’d leave at assassinations- a stylized backwards S- would remain the same, it was a name she’d chosen for herself. And that made every bit of difference.  
  
"My name is Sentinel," she told the mirror. "And anyone who wants to hurt my dads or my mom... they’re gonna have to get through me!"  
  



End file.
